Few historical issues have occasioned such discussion since at least the time of Marx as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe.  Meer

The Inquisition was the most powerful disciplinary institution in the early modern world, responsible for 300,000 trials and over 1.5 million denunciations.  Meer

This book is a contribution to both national and local history. Coventry is taken as a richly documented case-study of the crisis which marked the end of the medieval period for many substantial towns.  Meer

This study of late medieval Sicily develops a critique of theories of dependence through trade, and a new interpretation of the late medieval economy.  Meer

The introduction of the horse brought many advantages to medieval English farming, particularly as an improvement to ploughing and hauling. But the replacement of oxen by horses was by no means inevitable, as the situation often depended upon a number of factors not immediately obvious to modern eyes.  Meer

This is a major study by a leading scholar in the field of continental witchcraft studies. Based on an intensive search through central and local legal records for south-eastern Germany, an area extending well beyond but including present-day Bavaria, the author has compiled a thorough overview of all known prosecutions for witchcraft in the period 1300–1800.  Meer

This book, first published in 2000, offers a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of how European travellers in India developed their perceptions of ethnic, political and religious diversity over three hundred years.  Meer

This study explores the egalitarian policies pursued in the provinces during the radical phase of the French Revolution, but moves away from the habit of looking at such issues in terms of the Terror alone.  Meer

This book takes a look at the 'age of reform', from 1780 when reform became a common object of aspiration, to the 1830s - the era of the 'Reform Ministry' and of the Great Reform Act of 1832 - and beyond, when such aspirations were realized more frequently.  Meer

This book examines the ways in which the Swiss defined their national identity in the long nineteenth century, in the face of a changing domestic and international background.  Meer

This 2002 book provides a major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Bringing together a wide variety of literary and legal sources - including sermons, pamphlets, plays, diaries, periodicals, trial reports and the records of marital litigation - it documents a growing diversity in perceptions of marital infidelity in this period, against the backdrop of an explosion in print culture and a decline in the judicial regulation of sexual immorality.  Meer

This is a critical re-evaluation of one of the best known episodes of crowd action in the English Revolution, in which crowds in their thousands invaded and plundered the houses of the landed classes.  Meer

This book contains eight articles, six of which are based on papers contributed to a commemoration conference organised by the Past and Present Society in 1981.  Meer

This book presents a fresh view of crucial processes of change, offering through an interdisciplinary analysis, fresh insights into both the history and literature of the land in early modern England.  Meer

In a number of related case-studies, this book traces the social political, and cultural factors making for conformity and obedience, and those promoting dissidence and revolt in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.  Meer

During the period 1840–1940 biology and medicine were transformed, and took on major implications for social amelioration and population growth. New biological disciplines such as genetics and psychology consciously used scientific explanation to redefine the life of the individual.  Meer

This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft.  Meer

The history of crime is an exciting field, forming one aspect of a much wider increase in interest in social history as a whole. This book, based on a detailed study of court records in Essex between 1620 and 1680 combines a detailed study of fluctuations in crime and punishment in a seventeenth-century English county with an analysis of the social processes which lay behind prosecution.  Meer

Rebellion, riot and popular unrest have been the theme of a succession of stimulating and influential articles in Past and Present. This selection shows how the various forms of popular protest in England from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been reinterpreted by modern scholars.  Meer

Newly avilable in paperback, this major contribution to cultural history is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Daniel Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent and the kind of clothes they wore.  Meer