Description
Book SynopsisThis is a pioneering account of the intimate connection between landscape, place and identity in early modern England and of how ordinary people ordered their world. Andy Wood charts how custom and popular memory generated a usable past that legitimated claims to rights, space and resources in the present.
Trade Review'This is a book to read slowly and to savour. It is exceptionally rich: in fresh and illuminating material; in historical imagination and insight; in conceptual sophistication and in interpretative implications. It combines breadth of vision with vivid specificity, and is written with fluency and power, from its arresting opening to its trenchant conclusion. It is a truly major work.' Keith Wrightson, Townsend Professor of History, Yale University
'The Memory of the People is a tour de force, its conceptual sophistication and empirical rigor representing social history at its very best. Based on protracted and sensitive engagement with a huge range of manuscript source material derived from the law courts (especially the equity jurisdictions of early modern England), it draws inspiration not only from historical studies of the significance of custom, but also from the work of sociologists, socio-linguists, social anthropologists and historical geographers. Andy Wood's penetrating analysis of plebeian culture will radically transform the way historians think about popular understandings of time and space in the English past.' Steve Hindle, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Huntington Library
'A dense, thought-provoking and penetrating book that will inspire a new generation of students of early modern history.' History Today
'The study of popular perceptions of the past has taken a dramatic step forward with this splendid book.' Daniel Woolf, Renaissance Quarterly
'Beautifully, and very accessibly, written, this book deserves to be recognised as an instantaneous classic.' Rural History
Table of Contents1. Reformation, custom and the end of medieval England; 2. Custom and popular memory; 3. Rights, resources and social alignments; 4. Topographies of remembrance; 5. Textual and verbal ways of remembering; 6. The politics of popular memory.
