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.
Andy Wood is Professor of Social History at the University of Durham. The author of five books, including The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (2007) and The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (2013) which won the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award in 2014, his current research focuses on the study of authority and resistance in England from 1500-1640.
Title: Faith, Hope and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640
Author: Wood, Andy
ISBN: 9781108814454
Binding:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2020-10-22
Number of Pages: 306
Weight: 0.4401 kg
'A profound and impassioned account of what it meant to be a neighbour in an age of societal transformation. By reappraising the relationship between the idea and experience of neighbourliness, often viewed in terms of conflict or decline, Wood demonstrates vividly how perennial bonds between working people were emotionally rewarding as well as economically functional.' Malcolm Gaskill, University of East Anglia
'An extraordinary archival exploration into what early modern people thought and said about belonging and exclusion. Andy Wood gives voice to those who experienced the values of faith, hope and charity most sharply, through the ongoing tensions between collectivity and exclusion, in the streets and villages of early modern England; this book shows how neighbourhood was both an abstract ideal and a mode of emotional and social engagement, gendered power and social interaction.' Laura Gowing, Kings College London
'A deeply empathetic exploration of how the ideal of neighbourhood continued to be used to hold early modern communities together in the face of new challenges like Puritanism, and old such as hunger and disease. It is, as Wood states, a celebration of 'voices in the archive' as they expressed the need for togetherness.' Craig Muldrew, University of Cambridge