Joseph P. Ward

R. O. Bucholz

Robert O. Bucholz

This book is a history of London from 1550 and 1750, the period of its rise to world-wide prominence. Incorporating recent work in urban history, accounts by contemporary Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city, it examines how London came to dominate the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles as never before nor since.

A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750

London

Michael MacDonald

Muriel C. McClendon

Assessing the English Reformation's legacy of increasing religious diversification, this book explores the complex ways in which England's gradual transformation from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation presented men and women with new ways in which to define their relationships with society.

Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England

Protestant Identities

Angela Vanhaelen

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Performance, Geography, Privacy

Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe

This interpretation of the cultural consequences of social, economic, religious, and political change in early modern London challenges many long-held assumptions of historians and literary critics.

Joseph P. Ward

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