Accounting for Oneself
Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 12 April 2018
- ISBN 9780198820468
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages384 pages
- Size 233x152x20 mm
- Weight 550 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
A fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England: the first study to fully incorporate women, to offer comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life-cycle, and to represent regional variation.
MoreLong description:
Accounting for Oneself is a major new study of the social order in early modern England, as viewed and articulated from the bottom up. Engaging with how people from across the social spectrum placed themselves within the social order, it pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts when answering questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, and with a broad geographical coverage, this study explores how men and women accounted for their 'worth' and described what they did for a living at differing points in the life-cycle. A corrective to top-down, male-centric accounts of the social order penned by elite observers, the perspective from below testifies to an intricate hierarchy based on sophisticated forms of social reckoning that were articulated throughout the social scale. A culture of appraisal was central to the competitive processes whereby people judged their own and others' social positions. For the majority it was not land that was the yardstick of status but moveable property-the goods and chattels in people's possession ranging from livestock to linens, tools to trading goods, tables to tubs, clothes to cushions. Such items were repositories of wealth and the security for the credit on which the bulk of early modern exchange depended.
Accounting for Oneself also sheds new light on women's relationship to property, on gendered divisions of labour, and on early modern understandings of work which were linked as much to having as to getting a living. The view from below was not unchanging, but bears witness to the profound impact of widening social inequality that opened up a chasm between the middle ranks and the labouring poor between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. As a result, not only was the social hierarchy distorted beyond recognition, from the later-seventeenth century there was also a gradual yet fundamental reworking of the criteria informing the calculus of esteem.
[A]n important and imaginative book, which will shape discussions of the social order in early modern England for years to come... Accounting for Oneself is an extraordinary achievement. It will structure historians' understandings of social order for at least a generation, and it promises to provoke further research so that we better understand the nuances of the changing social order for the early modern period. It is a book that should be on the bookshelf of every modern British historian, and it will help all of us think more clearly about the society we study.
Table of Contents:
Self and Society in Early Modern England
Part I: Wealth and Poverty
Calculating Credit
Quantifying Status
Demarcating Poverty
Part II: Maintenance
Maintaining Oneself
Depending on Others
Making a Living
Part III: The Changing Currency of Credit
Refashioning Credibility
Conclusion: Reappraising the World of Goods
Bibliography
