Although ownership of real property was crucial to the economic opportunities of medieval urban women, few studies systematically investigate the gender distribution of medieval real property over time. Using censiers (rarely used sources), this article approaches this question through a socio-geographical analysis of Brussels. The study finds that, despite the region's egalitarian inheritance laws, female ownership of real property was relatively limited, and it declined during the late Middle Ages. This decrease accelerated during economic crises, and especially affected the property of non-elite women. Further research on the changing economic opportunities of medieval women would benefit from a more explicit discussion of non-labour income sources and social status.

Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises. Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks. Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the ‘dead’ season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty.

The German voluntary association (hereafter in German the Verein, or Vereine in the plural) played an important role in the evolution of German society in the later nineteenth century and in the first third of the twentieth. This sort of association (or male bourgeois club) was a cornerstone of European Enlighenment society at the end of the eighteenth century, of the liberal society of the Vormärz, and of the German political parties in the years 1848–1849. Furthermore, the Verein was one of the main characteristics in the rise and hegemony of German bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century, and one of the cornerstones of local society as it developed in Germany towards the end of the 1890s.

Research into the German Vereine is very advanced. To this day, historical research continues to benefit from Thomas Nipperdeys' breakthrough article concerning the importance of the Vereine in the rise of bourgeois-liberal society prior to 1848. Otto Dann, Wolfgang Hardtwig, and Dieter Düding have expanded our knowledge concerning the importance of the Vereine for the rise of bourgeois nationalism and liberalism before 1848. Regional studies have also emphasized these aspects during the Vormärz period and after.

Folklorist-anthropological research is indebted to Hermann Bausinger's article on the importance of the connection between the Vereine and the development of German folklore. Similarly, Max Weber paved the way for the sociological research on the Vereine that has flourished since the 1860s, led by sociologists such as Hans Jürgen Siewert and Gerhard Wurzbacher. These are the two dominant streams in current research of the Vereine, although it is beyond the scope of this article to explore them here.

In this article, I compare women's work opportunities in Bilbao, in northern Castile, and Antwerp, in the Low Countries, from 1400 to 1560. I argue that the different organisation of work in the two towns had a great influence on women's economic opportunities. Whereas women in Antwerp often worked alongside other members of their household because of the town's dominant craft guilds, Bilbao's informal trades were open to women on their own, independent of their husband or another male relative. As a result, women in Bilbao are more visible in the sources and were able to exert more influence on the town council.

This article focuses on the role played by local mobility in processes of confession and community building, taking the Catholic population in seventeenth-century Palestine as a case study. Works on the Reformation in Europe have acknowledged a connection between the strengthening of confessional identities and geographical mobility. Through the analysis of the parish records of Bethlehem, the article reveals some characteristics of seventeenth-century Catholic mobility in Palestine and shows how this mobility was bound up with the consolidation of a tiny Catholic minority and the establishment of a sacramental network. From a larger perspective, this research suggests that mobility plays an important role in the development and consolidation of small communities in a context of competing religion. From a methodological point of view, it also shows the importance of microanalysis in understanding the geographical mobility associated with religious practices and allegiances.

This article evaluates the extent of child farm labour in Spain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The first part of the article examines child labour in rural areas. Because under-registration of farm child labour was common in both national and local censuses, the writer examines other evidence, including surveys of child labour on farms and school-enrolment registers listing seasonal and as well as full-time labour. The second part of the article considers the relationship between employment and school absenteeism by age and gender. School attendance is compared by season and by geographic area, and its relation to farming is apparent. All the evidence in the registers demonstrates extensive employment of children over the age of ten in rural Spain.

In nineteenth-century Canada, a Census was conducted every ten years, beginning in 1851. Historians have tried to use the information in the local, provincial, and national Censuses to determine the rate of mortality and causes of death. The mortality statistics are thought to be reliable after 1921, but practical as well as conceptual problems interfere with attempts to establish retrospective mortality patterns using the nineteenth-century Census. In this paper, I will review the problems with this source on mortality. I will then compare the Census data with that derived from a study of a physician's daybooks, focusing on four specific areas of discrepancy and the possible reasons for the differences. Finally, I will suggest that the combined use of both types of sources may challenge some durable assumptions and could help to establish more reliable estimates of mortality patterns.

This article charts the long-term development of seigneurial governance within the principality of Guelders in the Low Countries. Proceeding from four quantitative cross-sections (c. 1325, 1475, 1540, 1570) of seigneurial lordships, the conclusion is that seigneurial governance remained stable in late medieval Guelders. The central argument is that this persistence of seigneurial governance was an effect of active collaboration between princely administrations, lords, and local communities. Together, the princely government and seigneuries of Guelders formed an integrated, yet polycentric, state. The article thereby challenges the narrative of progressive state centralisation that predominates in the historiography of pre-modern state formation.

The settlement of structural commercial conflicts of interest cannot be exclusively subsumed under the heading of dispute resolution. Even when a particular conflict opposing specific individuals or groups of interests could be settled, the broader underlying conflicts of interest would subsist and re-emerge. Both commercial and institutional or political actors would therefore rely on various techniques of conflict management, a process imposing restraint on the opposing parties while allowing sufficient leeway for business to be continued. Both conflict resolution and conflict management were devices of public and corporate governance, and therefore, following the late medieval tradition, instruments more or less based on established patterns of legal or quasi-legal models legitimised by accepted or conventional parameters of ‘justice’.

Historians of medieval society tend to emphasise the roles of either individual peasants or the village community. They also debate the importance of the market in the peasant economy. Here the focus is on partnership, defined as two or more people pursuing common objectives in a mutual co-operative relationship. Peasants sometimes held land jointly, and new land might be cleared by two or more people. Pairs of peasants regularly took on paid work. It is argued that a likely explanation for occasional flurries of litigation was a breakdown of partnerships. The multiple legal disputes suggest the range of collaborative activities undertaken by peasants, from domestic bread making to the management of pastures. Partnerships may have contributed to the resilience of peasant holdings, especially in the period 1370–1420. Local courts and communities responded with peace-making measures if former partners lapsed into extreme hostility.

This article examines households containing lodgers in the Carpathian Basin during the eighteenth century, using the status animarum, lists of inhabitants made by the Roman Catholic Church. The author argues that lodgers had special demographic and household characteristics. Evidence is provided to show that the majority of lodger households consisted of both families fragmented by family catastrophe and young couples at the beginning of their life-career. It is further argued that it would be worthwhile to extend the work on lodgers with comparative analyses, particularly because such work would shed light on this stratum of society, which is so often missing from micro-level demographic histories.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the income and expenditure of a stem family household from Bastelica, Corsica, based on information collected in 1867 and 1887 according to the scheme recommended by Frédéric Le Play. The budget indicates the work undertaken by each member of the family and which economic activities were most valuable to the family in terms of the income they generated and the level of profit. The primary resource of the family was its members, as the family used almost no non-family labour. The composition of the household, and the distribution of its members in terms of age and sex, were therefore critical for its economic well-being. Members of the family contributed their labour according to their sex, age and place within the household. Males were better paid than females but each son received more than his father and the daughters were better paid than their mother. Apart from the father, the less well paid the family member, the longer the time they were at work. In addition, the two highly paid sons were unemployed for more than half of the year. This provided a reserve of labour in the event of a rise in the ratio of consumers to workers within the family. The economy of the family was based on the exploitation of its patrimony and on animal husbandry. Food constituted the largest single item of expenditure but the diet of this family did not provide the 2,800 calories of the average diet in France between 1855 and 1874.

This article takes as a point of departure the paucity of scholarship on Scottish poor relief, which has been predominantly depicted as an inferior and underdeveloped version of its southern counterpart. We adopt a case study approach looking at two examples of Lowland and Highland urban infrastructures of poor relief to illustrate the application of the ideology of ‘improvement’ philosophy onto the treatment of the poor between c.1720 and 1790. Situating the study within the context of Scottish ‘improvement’, we explore the ways theoretical and practical approaches towards the poor were shaped by the combination of commercial and evangelical attitudes to human capital investment and long-term reform, echoing similar developments across Europe. At the close of the eighteenth century, the Scottish system transitioned from a community based, localised system of reciprocal hierarchy operated by the parish and kirk structures to a system increasingly rooted in legalism and the concept of rights based social provision.

In this paper, an attempt will be made to discuss the likely context for pre-plague indications of expropriation and its limits. There is plentiful evidence of an active land market in medieval villages by the end of the thirteenth century, and most likely for some time earlier. Fluctuation in the rate of buying and selling coincided with difficult harvest years and suggests a link between impecunious peasant sellers and wealthier peasant buyers. There is also some association between the selling of land and pre-existing indebtedness. In a period of partial commercial and market development, the extent to which exchange of land or of moveables proceeded to a significant structural redistribution of land and resources was constrained, and even in those parts of the country where an early peasant land market was well-established, significant adjustment is not evident. Instead, impediments to expropriation, such as seigneurial control of peasant land and limited capacity for extensive capital accumulation, acted as constraints on significant accumulation and redistribution. That said, there is limited suggestion in our sources of a redistribution of property rights associable with inequality of dealing and the advantage of wealthier landholders and creditors. In exploring this last point, particular use is made of the court records for the Welsh marcher lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd.