This article examines a series of disputes that developed among villagers in the Duchy of Württemberg in south-west Germany during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, disputes that were appealed to higher courts and became a matter for decision by the Duchy's ruling council. The disputes concerned the allocation of free wood from communally owned woodlands, and the size of shares permitted to particular groups, but developed into arguments over the nature of communal government and the authority of custom. They provide avenues to the understanding of the development of intra-village tensions, and to how disputes over resource allocation could erupt at particular instances, drawing higher echelons of state authority into the resolution of essentially local problems. In doing so the article seeks to provide a corrective to simplistic explanations of why resource regulation occurs at particular junctures, and contributes to a history of state formation, the village commune and legal change, giving proper place to pressures ‘from below’ as well as government intervention.

This article argues that naming can reveal personal ideologies, family connections, social interactions and changes in the concerns of the inhabitants of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ethnic and religious differences are indicated by the differing naming practices used by the Gaelic Irish, Old English and New English, Scots and Welsh inhabitants of Ireland. Much can be divined about the symbolism underlying naming practice when the names given to children are compared with those of their parents, godparents, family members and other significant individuals. The associated importance of nicknames and by-names, wordplay about names, and the circumstances under which people might change their names are also considered.

The confinement of married women by their husbands in their homes or in private madhouses was an issue which caused much concern in eighteenth-century England, but which has been little explored by historians. This article uses the records of the court of King's Bench, a source which has been previously neglected by historians of marriage, to explore the circumstances of this form of marital abuse. It shows that within eighteenth-century English law there was much uncertainty about the ‘right’ of husbands to confine their wives, and that this allowed some men to test the limits of their authority. It argues that although some women were able to adopt legal and extra-legal strategies in response to confinement, changing notions of ideal femininity shaped the ways in which women were able to respond to marital abuse, and left genteel women peculiarly vulnerable to accusations of madness and to subsequent confinement in a madhouse.

Changing established systems of government entitlement is a thorny proposition, even for popular states with sturdy holds on the reigns of power. The Russian Federation, in the throes of a severe economic downturn, extreme political instability and social crisis, has nonetheless altered the official stance toward forms of entitlement from the previous regime. Benefits cut from the ‘social contract’ have included guaranteed employment, free post-secondary education and access to state-subsidized apartments, in attempts to redefine the lines of authority and responsibility between citizens and the state. Other lines of responsibility appear sacrosanct. The Soviet pension system, more specifically the old age and service pensions, remains in place, but with extreme delays in payment, poor indexing to the cost of living and high levels of tax evasion.

In this article I examine the ways in which both the legacy of Soviet pension policies and post-1991 economic and social trends have constrained policy options concerning pension reform, particularly in reference to old age pensions, and prevented a serious re-evaluation of pension provision. The Russian Federation government inherited a pension system ill-equipped to cope with its aging population. However, the previous pension system did deliver payments on a regular basis to nearly one in five citizens before 1991. Unlike other areas of often unfulfillable social services guarantees (housing for families, quality health care and free access to higher education), the pension system represented a Soviet social programme that provided consistent direct assistance to a large proportion of the population. Pension payments were an expected entitlement.

The study documents fluctuations of proto-industrial income, of occupation, debt and presence on land markets across the life course for rural households in a major proto-industrial region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These fluctuations are interpreted on the basis that a major objective of households is to equalize their income across different stages of their development. The permanent income hypothesis is then extended to take into account land purchases and debt-contracting that result from the need to adjust land and capital to fluctuations in the size of the family labour force across the family cycle and from endeavours to improve the family's welfare by increasing the labour to land ratio. The empirical material presented shows marked fluctuations of income from proto-industrial work across the life course and suggests the existence of permanent income-cum-accumulation strategies to cope with these fluctuations.

As elsewhere in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, general dissatisfaction among Dutch doctors with their position in society and with overall levels of public health led to an active endeavour to raise their own status and to improve the level of public hygiene. For the most part these sanitary reformers or hygienists were inspired by the ‘Bodentheorie’ (literally ‘soil theory’) of the Munich hygienist Max von Pettenkofer, which postulated a specific relationship between chemical and biological processes in soil and air and in the human body, and by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, according to whom statistics were an important means to social progress. The hygienists stressed the need for objective measures of health, including empirical research, standardization of data collection, and increased dissemination of data.

Although a national system of death registration had been functioning in the Netherlands for more than thirty years, there was no national registration of causes of death. Only local registration of causes existed and these were considered insufficient and inaccurate.

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire's post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements and tax/payment obligations. Thus, because of how observers measured peasant well-being, it appeared as if peasants had been over-changed for their post-emancipation land allotments and were doomed to exist in a permanent state of crisis.

John Graunt's pioneering study, Natural and Political Observations Made upon on the Bills of Mortality (1662) has been overlooked as a source for ideas about the importance of child mortality in an urban environment. Graunt seems to have been the first to arrive at an infant mortality rate (IMR), but this has been little explored. Graunt helped to define ‘the urban penalty’, but not in terms of the IMR. The article explains Graunt's focus on other aspects of urban mortality in relation to his need to reassure those in government, his methodology, and above all his gender. For context, the article looks at attitudes to childhood among members of the influential Hartlib circle of reformers, with which Graunt was connected. These male writers were greatly concerned about children, but seem to have shared with Graunt the traditional idea that children under the age of about seven were the responsibility of women.

During the night of 24 May 1524 a fire broke out in the city of Troyes in the French province of Champagne, a fire which was to rage for two days and nights, destroying up to a quarter of the town (including at least 300 houses) and seriously damaging three of the city's churches. A number of fatalities was also reported. In the aftermath of the fire, as an assessment of the damage was made, the city council undertook a review of municipal security and ordered the expulsion of non-natives of Troyes, the safe storage of inflammable materials and the provision of water outside each house. Emergency grain supplies were also organized, as many stores had been destroyed in what had already been a poor yield that year. The extent of the fire reveals the vulnerability of urban communities at a time when fire-fighting methods were still extremely primitive and fire insurance non-existent, but the sources also demonstrate the capacity of these communities to recover from such a setback. For fire was a common enough occurrence in cities in this period, an everyday hazard in narrow streets where houses were huddled together and the primary building material and source of fuel, for both domestic use and manufacturing, was wood. Indeed, there is now a substantial literature on urban fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which concentrates largely on the physical damage inflicted, the sources of relief available to the victims and the precautions to be taken to prevent a recurrence of such misfortune.

This article is a case study addressing the issues of concubines, legitimacy and inheritance in early modern Japan. Although there was some discussion about the legal status of concubines/mistresses in the late nineteenth century in Meiji Japan, the topic has attracted surprisingly little recent research. The Meiji debate was concerned with how to treat concubines under a system that both outlawed bigamy and recognized common law marriages. The later academic debate refers back to the earlier interpretations of the legal and social status of concubines, with one side claiming they were nearly equal to wives and the other claiming they were little more than servants. In this study I review the above debates and then address the issue with a study of an inheritance case that began in 1819 when Fukui Sakuzaemon adopted an heir from outside the family. Sakuzaemon's concubine Iwa played an important role in the inheritance agreement and in further developments in the suit, including later efforts to disinherit the new head and gain support for her daughters by Sakuzaemon. I use the documents from this complicated case to analyse the social and legal statuses of Iwa and the relationship of her daughters to the Fukui family and its assets.

‘Famine foods’ seems a self-explanatory term but careful reading of the existing literature suggests otherwise. ‘Famine foods’ seem to suggest repulsive and unfamiliar foods consumed only in famine situations. This paper, using the Greek famine of 1941–43 as a case study, suggests that this is not the case. Starving people continue to use foods that they are familiar with or that other sections of the population are familiar with. The very poor sections of the population may well use fodder food, which nevertheless they are familiar with and which in most cases was also used by some of their members even in ‘normal’ times.

The Nahua (Aztecs) of ancient Mexico lived in large, extended family households (calli). A fundamental tenet of family history is that in the past high mortality was a major obstacle to household complexity. This was not the case for the Nahua, whose life expectancy was probably worse than any seen in Europe since the Black Death. Nahua populations were characterized by patriarchy, child marriage and greater proportions of complex and more diverse households than in regions of Europe which historians have identified as containing many complex households. Among the Nahua, although relationships within the household could be either uxorilocal or virilocal (relationship through the wife or the husband), subordination of women to male patriarchs was extensive. Most girls were married (cohabiting) well before the age of puberty. Thus, childless couples were common, but males without children rarely attained headship. While neither polygamy nor abandonment was widespread, their significance for gender oppression should not be denied. Widowhood offered new opportunities for companionship, but only for widowers. For widows, remarriage was infrequent and subordination to a male relative was inevitable. In modern Mexico, few remnants of this pre-conquest household system remain. According to the 1990 census, fewer than 10 per cent of Mexicans live as extended kin or as non-relatives in a household, even in rural Morelos where four centuries ago the compound family was the norm. The few modern examples of multiple family households tend to be Hispanic-like virilocal, patrilineal extended families.

This article offers an innovative attempt to construct an empirically-based estimate of the extent of syphilis prevailing in two contrasting populations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Thanks to the co-incident survival of both a detailed admissions register for Chester Infirmary and a pioneering census of the city of Chester in 1774 taken by Dr John Haygarth, it is possible to produce age-specific estimates of the extent to which adults of each sex had been treated for the pox by age 35. These estimates can be produced both for the resident population of Chester city and comparatively for the rural region immediately surrounding Chester. These are the first estimates of the prevalence of this important disease produced for the eighteenth century and they can be compared with similar figures for England and Wales c. 1911–1912.

Based on archival research in several Italian city-states, this article examines medieval prison life, its attendant pains, and inmate coping strategies by substantially engaging the variety of scholarship on modern incarceration. It demonstrates the limited degree to which current hardships overlap with those of earlier forms of captivity, and underscores the diversity of inmates' social positions in both eras. Medieval prisoners were marginalized, but they avoided social liminality (a major present-day risk) largely thanks to their visibility, accessibility, and frequent interaction with free society.

This paper analyses the interactions amongst family, household and extended kin through an examination of two ‘circulations’ of children within rural Irish communities during the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the daily journey from home to school; (2) going to live with relatives other than parents. Drawing on life-history narratives, the article develops a new perspective on the stem-family system in Ireland by showing how ‘incomplete’ family households formed integral parts of local kinship circles and were deeply engaged in the everyday lives of ‘complete’ family households, including the promotion of extended family survival and social mobility.