London And The Seventeenth Century

The first comprehensive history of seventeenth-century London, told through the lives of those who experienced it The Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, Charles I’s execution, the Plague, the Great Fire, the Restoration, and then the Glorious Revolution: the seventeenth century was one of the most momentous times in the history of Britain, and Londoners took center stage. In this fascinating account, Margarette Lincoln charts the impact of national events on an ever-growing citizenry with its love of pageantry, spectacle, and enterprise. Lincoln looks at how religious, political, and financial tensions were fomented by commercial ambition, expansion, and hardship. In addition to events at court and parliament, she evokes the remarkable figures of the period, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Pepys, and Newton, and draws on diaries, letters, and wills to trace the untold stories of ordinary Londoners. Through their eyes, we see how the nation emerged from a turbulent century poised to become a great maritime power with London at its heart—the greatest city of its time.

Seventeenth-century England has been richly documented by th lives of kings and their great ministers, the nobility and gentry, and bishops and preachers, but we have very little firsthand information on ordinary citizens. This unique portrait of the life, thought, and attitudes of a London Puritan turner (lathe worker) is based on the extraordinary personal papers of Nehemiah Wallington—2,600 surviving pages of memoirs, religious reflections, political reportage, and letters. Coming to maturity during the reign of James I, Wallington witnessed the persecution of Puritans during Archbishop Laud’s ascendancy under Charles I, welcomed what he thought would be the godly revolution brought by the Long Parliament, and watched with increasing disillusionment the falure of that dream under the Rump republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate. The author reconstructs Wallington’s inner world, allowing us to see what an ordinary man made of a lifetime of reading Puritan doctrine and listening to the sermons of Puritan preachers. For the first time we can penetrate the mind of one of those who made up the London mob calling for the end of episcopacy and the death of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, who welcomed the revolution, if not the war that followed, and who finally came to approve the death of his king.

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A.C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature; the rise of the individual as a general and not merely an aristocratic type; and the invention and application of instruments and measurement in the study of the natural world. Grayling vividly reconstructs this unprecedented era and breathes new life into the major figures of the seventeenth century intelligentsia who span literature, music, science, art, and philosophy--Shakespeare, Monteverdi, Galileo, Rembrandt, Locke, Newton, Descartes, Vermeer, Hobbes, Milton, and Cervantes, among many more. During this century, a fundamentally new way of perceiving the world emerged as reason rose to prominence over tradition, and the rights of the individual took center stage in philosophy and politics, a paradigmatic shift that would define Western thought for centuries to come.

Reveals the stories of girls making their way as apprentices in 17th-century London, through arguments, thefts, profits, and paperwork.

London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a surprisingly diverse place, home not just to people from throughout the British Isles but to a significant population of French and Dutch immigrants, to travelers and refugees from beyond Europe's borderlands and, from the 1650s, to a growing Jewish community. Yet although we know much about the population of the capital of early modern England, we know little about how Londoners conceived of the many peoples of their own city. Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London seeks to rectify this, addressing the question of how the inhabitants of the metropolis ordered the heterogeneity around them. Rather than relying upon literary or theatrical representations, this study emphasizes day-to-day practice, drawing upon petitions, government records, guild minute books and taxation disputes along with plays and printed texts. It shows how the people of London defined belonging and exclusion in the course of their daily actions, through such prosaic activities as the making and selling of goods, the collection of taxes and the daily give and take of guild politics. This book demonstrates that encounters with heterogeneity predate either imperial expansion or post-colonial immigration. In doing so it offers a perspective of interest both to scholars of the early modern English metropolis and to historians of race, migration, imperialism and the wider Atlantic world. An empirical examination of civic economics, taxation and occupational politics that asks broader questions about multiculturalism and Englishness, this study speaks not just to the history of immigration in London itself, but to the wider debate about evolving notions of national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book is the first comprehensive and detailed study of early modern midwives in seventeenth-century London. Midwives, as a group, have been dismissed by historians as being inadequately educated and trained for the task of child delivery. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London rejects these claims by exploring the midwives' training and their licensing in an unofficial apprenticeship by the Church. Dr. Evenden also offers an accurate depiction of the midwives in their socioeconomic context by examining a wide range of seventeenth-century sources. This expansive study not only recovers the names of almost one thousand women who worked as midwives in the twelve London parishes, but also brings to light details about their spouses, their families and their associates.

Mary Parish wasn’t your ordinary seventeenth-century woman. She was a “cunning woman,” who spent her time in the realm of magic, interacting with fairies, hunting for buried treasures, and communicating with the spirit world, along with her partner, the young aristocrat Goodwin Wharton. Drawing largely from Goodwin’s personal journals, Frances Timbers reconstructs Mary’s life in this microhistory, and explores themes of class, gender, and relationships in seventeenth-century England. Mary’s story provides insight into magical beliefs and practices of early modern history, and sheds light on how class and gender affected everyday life.

Lady Alice Le Strange of Hunstanton in Norfolk kept a continuous series of household accounts from 1610-1654. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths have used the Le Stranges' rich archive to reconstruct the material aspects of family life. This involves looking not only at purchases, but also at home production and gifts; and not only at the luxurious, but at the everyday consumption of food and medical care. Consumption is viewed not just as a set of objects owned, but as a process involving household management, acquisition and appropriation, a process that created and reinforced social links with craftsmen, servants, labourers, and the local community. It is argued that the county gentry provide a missing link in histories of consumption: connecting the fashions of London and the royal court, with those of middling strata of rural England. Recent writing has focused upon the transformation of consumption patterns in the eighteenth century. Here the earlier context is illuminated and, instead of tradition and stability, we find constant change and innovation. Issues of gender permeate the study. Consumption is often viewed as a female activity and the book looks in detail at who managed the provisioning, purchases, and work within the household, how spending on sons and daughters differed, and whether men and women attached different cultural values to household goods. This single household's economy provides a window into some of most significant cultural and economic issues of early modern England: innovations in trade, retail and production, the basis of gentry power, social relations in the countryside, and the gendering of family life.