Spouses, Siblings and Surnames: Reconstructing Families From Medieval Village Court Rolls

1983 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith M. Bennett

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Nutton

The last decade has witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in Galen of Pergamum that is without parallel since the early seventeenth century. New studies of Galen's concepts of psychology and medicine have examined afresh his position in the development of scientific thought, and historians have begun to realize the wealth of material for the social history of the Antonine Age that he provides. But, despite the earlier labours of Ilberg and Bardong to restore a chronological order to the many tracts that flowed readily from his pen, many of the events of his life still lack the precise dates that would enable even more valuable information to be extracted, especially upon the careers of his friends.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Mary E. Clarke ◽  
Ashley E. Sharpe ◽  
Elizabeth M. Hannigan ◽  
Megan E. Carden ◽  
Gabriella Velásquez Luna ◽  
...  

Large material accumulations from single events found in the archaeological record are frequently defined as evidence of ritual. They are interpreted as generalized deposit categories that imply rather than infer human motivations. While useful in the initial collection of data, these categories can, over time, become interpretations in and of themselves. The emic motivations behind the formation process of ‘ritual deposits’ ought to be considered using a relational ontology as an approach to understanding how past populations interacted with non-human actors, such as structures and natural features on the landscape. The present study evaluates the assembly and possible function of a dense deposit of artifacts recovered from a Classic period sweat bath at Xultun, Guatemala. Analyses of the various artifact types and human remains in the deposit in relation to what is known of the social history of the sweat bath itself illustrate ontological relationships among offered materials as well as between the offering and the personified place in which it was recovered. We observe that with a better understanding of place, it is possible to evaluate the ritual logic in Classic Maya material negotiations.


Africa ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Arens

Opening ParagraphDefinitional questions, such as ‘Who are the Waswahili’, posed by Eastman (1971) in this journal, appear to have been of little interest in the past, as many social anthropologists either ignored the problem or assumed that the answers were self-evident. However, those who have confronted this task have shown that simplicity and self-evidence is rarely a characteristic feature of the inquiry. Even classic ethnographic cases of supposed culturally homogeneous and distinct tribal groups are at present being re-examined in light of the renewed interest in this topic (cf. Helm, 1968). Whether or not the Nuer are the Dinka, or vice versa, it has been minimally established that such questions are legitimate and even fruitful in sharpening our analytical approach to subject populations.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 397
Author(s):  
Adeng Adeng

AbstrakKegiatan penelitian dan penulisan sejarah sosial baru dilakukan sekitar tahun 1950-an, baik di negara-negara maju maupun di negara-negara yang sedang berkembang. Di negara-negara yang sedang berkembang seperti Indonesia, kegiatan penelitian dan penulisan Sejarah Sosial masih sedikit dilakukan terutama yang bercorak sejarah sosial daerah. Penelitian dan penulisan sejarah yang sering dilakukan bercorak Sejarah Politik dan Sejarah Militer. Sejarah politik isinya menguraikan tentang pemerintahan kerajaan-kerajaan di Indonesia, pada masa pemerintahan Belanda, dan pendudukan Jepang. Sejarah Militer isinya tentang pertempuran-pertempuran baik melawan agresi Belanda maupun facisme Jepang. Dengan tersusunnya Sejarah Sosial Kota Bekasi diharapkan dapat diperoleh gambaran atau potret seluruh aspek kehidupan sosial daerah Kota Bekasi pada masa kini, dengan latar belakang masa lampau untuk memberikan proyeksi pada masa yang akan datang.  Untuk merekontruksi digunakan metode sejarah yang meliputi empat tahap, yaitu:  heuristik, kritik, interpretasi, dan historiografi. Kota Bekasi sebelumnya sebuah kecamatan dari Kabupaten Bekasi. Pada tahun 1982 Kecamatan Bekasi ditingkatkan statusnya menjadi kota administrasi. Pada tahun 1996 kembali ditingkatkan statusnya menjadi kotamadya. Dalam perkembangannya Kota Bekasi menjadi kawasan industri dan kawasan tempat tinggal kaum urban. Kota yang berada dalam lingkungan megapolitan ini merupakan salah satu kota besar urutan keempat di Indonesia yang terdapat di Provinsi Jawa Barat. AbstractThe Research and writing of the new social history made around the 1950s, both in developed countries and in emerging countries. In countries like Indonesia as one of the emerging countries, research and writing of Social History is few, especially about the history of social region.  Research and writing of history is often done patterned with Political History or Military History. The contents of Political history usually outlining with the era of kingdoms, and the governments in Indonesia at the time of Dutch and Japanese occupation.  The contents of Military History usually discussed the battles either against the aggression of the Dutch and Japanese fascism.  With the completion of the Social History of Bekasi City, hopefully it can get a photograph all aspects of the social life of the city of at present, with a background in the past to provide projections of future.  This research used historical method which includes four phases: heuristic, criticism, interpretation, and historiography.  In the past Bekasi well known as sub-district of Bekasi District. In 1982 the sub-district of Bekasi upgraded to municipality or administration city. Bekasi become a city in 1996.  In their development, Bekasi become a central of industrial area and as residence of urban society. The town is located in a megapolitan city of Jakarta, and one of the biggest cities in in the province of West Java.


Author(s):  
Stuart B. Schwartz

Scholarship on the early modern era in Brazil has been booming since the 1980s. This trend has been influenced theoretically by developments in the social sciences and by the cultural turn in history, by new information technologies of digitalization and the Internet, and by a series of centenaries that have generated institutional support for publications, conferences, and research. This article identifies a number of major themes and questions that have organized much of this historical production, notes the major writings that have moved the field in new directions, and discusses the shifts in emphasis in historical inquiry by concentrating on some of the works that have been seminal in the study of colonial Brazil. Five themes or trends are highlighted: the social history of the major groups within the colony (merchants, cane farmers and sugar barons, slaves, and the free population of color); a complementary cultural approach that has added attention to issues such as private life, public rituals, and subaltern agency; Afro-Brazilian life and culture; a surprisingly rich literature on the indigenous population; and studies of colonial governance.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 964-964
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Cone

This charming, beautifully illustrated book would be enjoyed just as much by the pedaitrician's wife as by the pediatrician. It is one of those books all of us occasionally come across which appeal not only to the nostalgic, sentimeiltal side of our lives but also fill a gap in our knowledge of how and what children did with their playtime in the past. The author shows clearly how important a study of toys would be if we were to try to understand the social history of children.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFFREY SKLANSKY

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the social sciences, documenting the diverse experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Frenkel

AbstractThe historicity of books – their role as a force in history – has been addressed in post-war literary studies from different perspectives and across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the scholarship on the history of the book in medieval Islam is still relatively sparse, even though this society underwent a thorough process of textualization. But even authors who do consider the social and cultural role of books in medieval Islam look only at the production and consumption of Arabic books within the boundaries of Muslim society, relying on Islamic sources which reflect mainly the courtly milieu of scribes and secretariats. None discuss books produced and consumed by the religious minorities that were an indispensable part of this society, and none have made use of the abundant Genizah documents as source material. In the present programmatic article, I call attention to the many book lists found in the Cairo Genizah and to their potential as significant tools for developing a better understanding of the cultural and social history of the medieval Islamicate world.


2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1140-1141
Author(s):  
Peter A. Coclanis

Over the past quarter century, no scholar has done more to document the social history of the colonial Chesapeake than Lorena Walsh. In so doing, she has made important scholarly contributions in a variety of areas, most notably, in agricultural history, demographic history, African American history, and women's history. Along with such scholars as Lois Green Carr, Allan Kulikoff, Darrett and Anita Rutman, and Russell Menard among others in the so-called Chesapeake School, Walsh has helped to create a powerful framework for understanding the evolution of Virginia and Maryland and for interpreting the behavior of the populations residing therein. Two of the hallmarks of the work of scholars associated with the “School” are innovative methodologies and meticulous, painstaking research, both of which characteristics are readily apparent in the volume under review.


2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 161-184
Author(s):  
Ulf Brunnbauer

This article argues that historical anthropology provides approaches for the exploration of previously neglected problems of the history of Southeastern Europe. Historical anthropology is not seen as a fixed set of methodologies and theories but rather as a perspective which directs attention to the questions of how societies have worked in the past and “ordinary” people made sense of their lives. Furthermore, historical anthropology tends to be comparative. In the past, Southeastern European historians concentrated on political history and ethnographers on the “traditional” culture of their nation, with little interaction between the two disciplines. After the fall of the communist system in 1989/1991, however, historians and ethnologists borrowed approaches from each other. The potential of historical anthropology is shown in particular with respect to the study of the social fabric of socialism—a topic until now shunned by historians while anthropologists have provided exemplary studies on this issue. The article ends with a discussion of the limits oPf historical anthropology and warns not to leave the state and economic structures out of historical analysis.


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