Social History
Introduction
You can see from the Table of Contents for this section what the major topics are. Social history is a wide-ranging topic, but these are the ones that tend to generate the most interest for the early modern period. In this Introduction I'll give a quick overview of each, but first a word or two at an even more general level.
Social history really comes into its own in the early modern period, for one simple reason: sources. Prior to about 1500 our sources for daily life, social structure, patterns of relationships, etc. are awfully thin. We have almost none of the usual types of sources, from diaries to parish registers to court records, we start to get bits and pieces in the late Middle Ages, but only in the 16th century do we start to get significant collections that allow us to delve deeply or to draw broad conclusions. To be sure, the sources are still nothing like what we'd wish--that doesn't happen until the late 1700s--but it's enough. We may not be able to see the whole house, but we can at least peer into this room or that, and we no longer feel as if we were groping in the dark.
A second factor makes social history in the early modern period increasingly important. While every century is a century of transition, the early modern period perhaps can make that claim with more justification than can at least the preceding few centuries. The really wrenching change, of course, came later, during the age of the so-called Dual Revolution (French and Industrial) of the late 1700s and early 1800s. The early modern period, as even its very name implies, gets much attention in its role as a precursor to that greater change: how much of the modern world can we see pre-figured in the early modern world? This approach has led to a good deal of wrong-headed research, but the work has nevertheless been important and has yielded substantial real information.
Besides this, though, the early modern period saw changes that were significant unto themselves. The most obvious is the subject of our course: the Reformation. Since the 1970s (at least), historians have wondered what was the impact of the Reformation on social relations. The great change in the economy also surely had social ramifications, as did the increasingly heavy hand of the State. Conversely, and this has been a strong theme in the current generation of historians, we are finding that social structures and conventions were an important factor in influencing the Reformation, the economy, and politics. It worked both ways.
And one final general comment: unlike with politics or economics, you won't find here much about trends. We aren't talking about the rise of anything, the fall of anything, a shift from this paradigm to that. Well, not as much, anyway. Speaking very broadly, early modern society not all that different from medieval society, except in certain very interesting ways. Rather, we'll be talking about adjustments, regional variations, and about persistence.