The Pursuit Of Stability; & Fire From Heaven
Life in the 17th century
- The Pursuit Of Stability: Social Relations In Elizabethan London
Ian W. Archer - Cambridge University Press, 1991 - 307 pp. - £3O
- Fire From Heaven: Life In An English Town In The Seventeenth Century
David Underdown - Harper Collins, 1992 - 308 pp. - £17.99
The urban history of early modern England emerged into prominence in the early 1970s with the publication of a range of studies attempting, on the one hand, to establish the distinctive demographic, economic and social structures of English towns, and on the other hand to characterise their changing fortunes between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The debates provoked by this pioneering work subsided in the early 1980s. Recent years, however, have seen a second flowering of this field, one which involves a shift of emphasis from demographic and economic to social, cultural and political issues and reveals a new determination to get to grips with the dynamic of social relations in urban communities.