Combining family history and the analysis of political elites, this article explores the development of the urban elite of Turin (Piedmont) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, through an analysis of the transformations in the kinships forming the ruling class, with particular regard to their structures and strategies for social and economic reproduction. The deep changes that affected this group and eventually led to its extinction and replacement by a new elite are addressed. It is argued that, alongside institutional rearrangements determined by the Dukes of Savoy, the inheritance strategies pursued by the kinships in order to preserve their economic and political role played a crucial part in their demise.

This article revalorises women's protest and popular political ideas in history. A case study focusing on three cities of the Low Countries shows that not only men, but also women were involved when it came to spreading subversive ideas, undermining the authority of urban governors, and mobilising discontent. The analysis of fifteenth-century records of repression from Antwerp, Mechelen and Leuven demonstrates that both male and female commoners permanently strove to change the governmental practices in town by using contentious speech.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, thousands of Londoners (and people from the rest of England) married clandestinely at the Fleet Prison. More weddings were celebrated there than any other location in England. This article will examine quantitatively who was marrying there, detailing their premarital status, origin and occupation. It will show that Londoners who married at the Fleet were broadly representative of London's population topography and occupational structure. The article also examines the non-Londoners who married at the Fleet, and shows that by c. 1750 the Fleet was hosting at least 10 per cent of all marriages in England.

Profound changes in output and productivity characterised eighteenth-century agriculture, both in regions of large-scale capitalist farming and smallholding cultivation. Aggregate, macro-level studies offer valuable insights, but often prove unable to explain yield increases. Therefore, this article proposes a social approach to agricultural production through a micro-level analysis of fertilisation strategies, taking the smallholding economy of inland Flanders as a starting point. The household perspective demonstrates that a green ‘fertiliser’ revolution with increasing levels of fertilising intensity and off-farm nutrient inputs was instigated from below on both small and large holdings as a response to the broader economic and societal situation.

Few studies have dealt with the issue of people living alone in pretransitional rural populations. Alone by choice or circumstances, usually poor and sometimes stigmatised, solitaries often had a hard life. This article analyses the characteristics and life-histories of people living alone in two rural villages in nineteenth-century Italy with the aim of understanding whether and how solitaries managed to find a way out from solitude. The results show that solitaries got married, joined another household, and especially emigrated more than the rest of the population, which is a strong indication of their willingness to break out of solitariness. The individuation of the demographic profile associated with such specific behaviours, namely being male, young, and widowed, allowed us also to draw some hypotheses on the role of availability and quality of social connections on the chances to escape from a solitary condition, as well as on the characteristics of migratory flows of solitaries from the countryside to the cities.