Historians constantly seek new windows into the past, and one which has proved particularly fruitful of late is litigation for verbal injury. For early modern North America Peter N. Moogk thinks that court hearings for defamation are ‘likely to disclose the mental climate of a society’, while Mary Beth Norton thinks that from such suits ‘we can identify the types of behaviour a society most abhors’. The gendered nature of insults has been a core theme of Laura Gowing's work, and must form a component of any consideration of the subject. This article looks at defamation cases in two commissary courts – in Edinburgh and Argyll – between 1750 and 1800 in order to see what they reveal about Scottish society at that time.

This article demonstrates, using evidence from church court depositions, that women's experience of service in early modern England was more varied than scholarship suggests. Moving beyond its conception as a life-cycle annual occupation, the article situates service within individual life-stories. It argues firstly, that service extended across the whole of women's working lives and secondly, that employment arrangements took a wide range of forms. Service for women is shown to have been flexible, varied and contingent, employing a diversity of individuals under a variety of different employment agreements.

This article suggests that analyses of child labour today should take as their point of comparison poorer nineteenth-century continental European countries, rather than the more commonly cited analogy of industrializing Britain. Two aspects of comparison between the nineteenth-century Finnish experience and today's developing economies are especially relevant. The first is the role of foreign investors in introducing industrial child labour in the early stages of industrialization. The second is labour migration, and particularly that of children. Industrial child labour in nineteenth-century Finland, and labour migration from Finland to St Petersburg, serve as empirical case studies. Finally, the author suggests that new apologies for industrial child labour in the past can be linked with the late-twentieth-century expansion of child labour.

In this article we address one of the most prominent questions in historical sociology: did economic modernization in the nineteenth century lead to societal openness? In an attempt to answer the question we examine the chances for lower-class grooms of marrying upwardly in five Belgian cities (Aalst, Leuven, Ghent, Verviers, and Liège). Our findings show that there is no support for a meritocracy hypothesis. The chances of marrying out of the lower classes did not increase, in either absolute or relative terms. Social closure strategies were efficient in that they apparently prevented upward marital mobility for lower-class grooms. As these findings were measured in a highly advanced economic context, this study casts strong doubts on the relationship between economic modernization, meritocracy, and marital mobility, at least for the nineteenth century.

A study of the parish records of St Peter upon Cornhill in London from 1580 to 1605 revealed that children suffered a greater increase in mortality than adults in the plague years of 1593 and 1603, and servants accounted for the majority of deaths within the 15–24 age group. Some family groups avoided the plague altogether, others suffered a single burial, however in some cases, individuals within the same family household were buried within a short period of each other. The epidemiological pattern is complex and is moderated by social and demographic networks. Comparisons are made with modern epidemics caused by Yersinia pestis.

The lunatic asylum remains one of the most remarkable institutional monuments of the modern world, dominating the social landscape of Victorian Britain and exercising a powerful attraction for social historians of medicine, an attraction almost as great as the spectre of the madhouse for contemporary novelists. Our image of the Victorian asylum is still pervaded to a surprising degree by the gloomy spectacle of the total institution presented by Michel Foucault, though it has been modified by a whole range of institutional and philosophical accounts undertaken in the past three decades. Pioneering studies by researchers such as Andrew Scull have illuminated not only the power exercised by the new asylum superintendents, armed with medical discourses of moral treatment and the early promise of curability, but also the continuing dominance of the ‘mad doctors’ in the sombre years of neo-Darwinian pessimism and eugenics doctrines. More recent contributions to the now enormous literature on the social history of insanity have shifted the focus of attention from earlier concerns with charting the rise of the asylum and the elaboration of medical discourses under the psychiatric gaze of physicians to a detailed reconstruction of the social environment of the asylum and especially to the interplay between familial circumstances and the way institutions responded to the insane. Such concerns were also clearly evident in important earlier studies by Walton, Scull, Digby and others, which drew on fundamental work by Anderson on the changing role of the family during industrialization. These scholars drew attention to the importance of family and kinship relations in the negotiation of a lunatic's passage to the Victorian asylum, as well as the role of wider forces of economic change, population growth and migration in shaping the environment in which decisions about the care of the mad were made.

There has recently been a tremendous new awareness of male violence against women, an awareness which spans the academic world, the services that come in contact with it, and popular initiatives. Edinburgh District Council's Zero Tolerance campaign (which arose out of a report on adolescents' knowledge about, and attitude to, domestic violence) began in 1992 and was a landmark in bringing this issue out into the open in Britain. Hundreds of articles have appeared in American medical journals in the last four or five years, and March 1995 saw the launch of a new interdisciplinary journal, entitled simply Violence Against Women. And of all the women who suffer violence, the greatest number are wives whose husbands abuse them.

The mortality transition in Western Europe and the United States encompassed a much more complex set of conditions and experiences than earlier thought. Our research addresses the complex set of relationships among growing urban communities, family wealth, immigration and mortality in New England by examining individual-level, sociodemographic mortality correlates during the nineteenth-century mortality plateau and its early twentieth-century decline. In contrast to earlier theories that proposed a more uniform mortality transition, we offer an alternative hypothesis that focuses on the impact of family wealth and immigration on individual-level mortality during the early stages of the mortality transition in Northampton and Holyoke, Massachusetts.

This article uses data from the 1833 Factory Inquiry to assess male and female occupations and earnings in factory textile production. These data are contrasted with evidence drawn from various sources on male and female employment in domestic industry. The period from 1760 to 1850 was a time of dramatic change in the nature and location of textile production, with important consequences for women's work. Whilst economic factors explain many of the changes we see, gender ideology had a powerful effect on how the labour market operated, and this was increasingly the case over this period as the organisation of work became more formalised and hierarchical.

This article analyses the economic activities of urban Flemish women in actual practice, using contracts and court judgements from the mid-fourteenth-century registers of the aldermen of Ghent. These ‘acts’ show that women routinely invested and managed their own property without male representatives and that distinctions of marital status were often far less significant in medieval Ghent than elsewhere in northern Europe. Another conceptualization of the scope of women's economic activity also existed at the time, in which men acted for women, but it was not the dominant norm in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent.

This article is the first to use a combination of three different types of inventories from Dorset to examine the material lives of paupers inside and outside Beaminster workhouse. It argues that life was materially better for paupers on outdoor relief, compared with workhouse inmates and with paupers in the moments before they entered the workhouse. The article also examines how the poor used admission into the workhouse as part of their economy of makeshifts. The evidence demonstrates that the able-bodied poor used the workhouse as a short-term survival strategy, whereas more vulnerable inmates struggled to use this tactic. This article therefore furthers our understanding of the nature of poor relief and adds further weight to recent historical work that has emphasised pauper agency.

What was the role of the family in individual reproductive decisions during state socialism? Can the family help to understand regional variations in fertility decline? This study provides an in-depth analysis of family relationships and their influences on individual reproductive decisions during the transition from first to second birth in Soviet Ukraine. Life history interviews are used to compare the western and eastern borderland cities of Lviv and Kharkiv, respectively, around 1950–1975. The findings reveal that regional differences in intergenerational ties and spousal cooperation shaped two reproductive strategies of transition to second birth, specifically postponing in Kharkiv and spacing in Lviv.

The large-scale abandonment of infants in the European past has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Its staggering dimensions in many countries of Europe, as recently as the nineteenth century, have prompted some uncomfortable rethinking about family life and parent–child (and especially mother–child) relations in the past. Studies of abandonment have contributed to our understanding not only of gender ideology and gender relations, but also of the roles played by state and Church in regulating sexuality and family life.

Yet research on abandoned children to date has had a limited focus. The great bulk of the literature looks at the process of abandonment itself, the terrifyingly high mortality of the foundlings in infancy, and the process by which foundling homes placed their wards in rural foster homes. Perhaps because of the notoriously high mortality of the abandoned babies – though also no doubt due to the greater difficulty of generating suitable data from the archives – little attention has been paid to those foundlings who survived childhood. Typical is the admission found in the major study of foundling homes in Portugal: ‘The fate of the few foundlings who reached adulthood is unknown.’

Yet through the nineteenth century – which provides our focus here – large numbers of foundlings did reach adulthood, and a variety of public authorities were very much concerned about just what kinds of adults they became. Even in determining the placement of infants with wetnurses, foundling home authorities considered the long-term implications for their future as adults. The widespread aversion to placing abandoned infants with wetnurses in the cities was linked to both a belief that the city was corrupt and was likely to produce less wholesome adults than a rural upbringing and to a concern that concentrating a large number of propertyless, family-less foundlings in the city might well create an adult population that would pose a threat to public order.

This article deals with the changing patterns of transmission of land and houses in pre-industrial rural Bohemia. By linking different sources, such as land registers, census-like lists and a family reconstitution, this study focuses on both the demographic and the economic factors that influenced peasant transmission strategies as well as on the consequences of changing transmission patterns for access to land-ownership in the local society. The results of this study show that patterns of land transmission changed profoundly after about 1720. Between 1651 and 1720 many houses with or without land were sold to non-kin as well as to kin although in both cases a customary and not a market price was paid. Imperfect market mechanisms are also indicated by the frequency of exchanges of houses between families. After around 1720 transmissions of property from father to son progressively became the dominant pattern. The chances of women (both widows and daughters and their husbands) to become property-holders diminished and it became extremely difficult for persons not born into house-owning families to acquire any houses or land.

‘Vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ have recently become hot topics in historiography. The main focus is on systemic vulnerability: the reasons why certain societies were better able to overcome crisis. In this article I want to address another type of vulnerability – inspired by the insights of Wisner and Blaikie: social vulnerability, and the differentiated impact of crisis on different social groups. Based on a unique corpus of sources – the grain censuses drafted during the grain crisis of 1556/57 – and a reconstruction of household budgets, I will reconstruct vulnerable groups, the root causes behind their vulnerability, and their coping mechanisms. By doing this I will show how systemic resilience could go hand-in-hand with vulnerable people, thus adding more depth to a growing research strand.

Reasons are given for doubting the currently fashionable thesis that economic growth and industrialisation in the case of England derived from establishing secure property rights after 1688. Customary and public rights remained at risk. Ancient arrangements often persisted far into Victorian times. Detailed evidence is presented of survivals and of illiquid features in the land market. Evidence is also given of endemic disputes over enclosure and tithes. Unlike some European countries, England failed to establish a land registry. Limited transactions probably reflected unwillingness to risk litigation. That unsatisfactory property rights did not, however, stifle growth is tribute to the underlying power of the market.