Faith, Hope and Charity
English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640

Explores the hidden lives of neighbourhoods in early modern England - their communal ideals, social practices, notions of gender, locality and belonging.

Andy Wood (Author)

9781108814454, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 October 2020

306 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

'His archival terrain is bountiful. Drawing on a remarkable range of materials (from ballads, plays, court records, parish records, and a wide array of social commentary in print and manuscript) Wood provides a richly textured account of the ways in which principles of common humanity could produce and consolidate bonds across various divides shaped by belief, gender, and locality as well as social politics.' Alexandra Shepard, Family & Community History

Faith, Hope and Charity explores the interaction between social ideals and everyday experiences in Tudor and early Stuart neighbourhoods, drawing on a remarkably rich variety of hitherto largely unstudied sources. Focusing on local sites, where ordinary people lived their lives, Andy Wood deals with popular religion, gender relations, senses of locality and belonging, festivity, work, play, witchcraft, gossip, and reactions to dearth and disease. He thus brings a new clarity to understandings of the texture of communal relations in the historical past and highlights the particular characteristics of structural processes of inclusion and exclusion in the construction and experience of communities in early modern England. This engaging social history vividly captures what life would have been like in these communities, arguing that, even while early modern people were sure that the values of neighbourhood were dying, they continued to evoke and reassert those values.

List of Abbreviations
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Charity Never Faileth: Defining Neighbourhood
1.1 The Crisis of Neighbourhood
1.2 Who Is My Neighbour?
1.3 Charity and Neighbourhood
1.4 Christian Neighbours
2. Charity Suffereth Long: Neighbourhood and Community
2.1 'A Nere Neyghbour is Better than a Farre Frende': The Social Logic of Neighbourhood
2.2 Paternalism and the Reinforcement of Hierarchy
2.3 Alcohol, Alehouses and Good Neighbourhood
2.4 Festivity, Play and the Celebration of Neighbourhood
3. Now Abideth Faith, Hope and Charity: Place Neighbourhood and People
3.1 Public Worlds
3.2 Nation, Country and Neighbourhood
3.3 'A Packe of People'? Urban Neighbourhoods
3.4 'A Kynde of Murdering my Neighbor': Disputes and their Settlement
3.5 The Gender of Neighbourhood
4. The Tongues of Men and Angels: Inclusion and Exclusion
4.1 Newfangled Precisians: Neighbourhood and Religious Division
4.2 Community Turned Inside Out: Witches, Gossips and Informers
4.3 The Plight of Thomas Barebones: Settlement, Place and Neighbourhood
4.4 The Better Sort and the Domination of Parish Politics
4.5 Robin Starveling and the Destroying Angel: Famine, Disease and the Limits of Neighbourhood
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]