This article studies the development of poor relief in the rural areas of the diocese of Tortona in the eighteenth century, through the analysis of the parish reports written for the pastoral visits of bishops Giulio Resta and Giuseppe Lodovico Andujar in 1741 and 1743. The reports record the most important assistance activities organised by different social actors: dowries for poor girls; bread, money and clothing to distribute to the poor; but also formal support in the form of hospitals providing shelter and care for pilgrims and the sick; the monti di pietà, which loaned money and the grain stores, which provided essential loans of grain. The diocese of Tortona in the eighteenth century represents a privileged point of view for understanding how the development of poor relief in the ancien régime was influenced by the political and institutional, geographical, landowning and socio-ecomomic context. Here, a complex institutional situation, combined with a diverse geographical and socio-economic context, gave rise to a variety of poor relief systems.

This study examines the policies applied to French immigrants in Aragon between 1635 and 1697, a period of economic decline and constant conflict between Spain and France. The commercial and tax measures imposed by the Spanish monarchy on French immigrants to support the war effort were opposed and constrained by Aragonese institutions, such as the Diputación or the Corte del Justicia de Aragón. After a period of debate the Aragonese Parliament developed an autonomous policy towards the end of the seventeenth century. In the interests of the Aragonese economy and elites, restrictions on migrants were lowered and revised, until they focused mainly on merchants. This legislation allowed immigrant flows to continue, but it could not counteract the decline of economic opportunities for the French in Aragon.

Although the Catholic Church claimed to control marriage, in late-eighteenth-century Malta the faithful still considered matrimony to be a personal affair. The study is based upon episcopal court records and parish registers, which reveal substantial numbers of clandestine marriages, contravening the Council of Trent's directives concerning entry into marriage. Couples separated from each other at will, without the Church's consent. A few took other partners, despite the inquisitors' nets. Couples viewed sexual relations as matters for themselves to regulate, and sex outside marriage as not something into which the Church was to intrude. Especially noteworthy in this respect were relations between betrothed, since a man would not marry a woman who could not bear children.

Using multiple sources, this study identifies women's intergenerational social mobility to a greater degree than most other studies on the topic. It examines the status of the fathers of women who ran a business or craft in a Swedish town that witnessed rapid urban–industrial transformations. Whereas only 15 per cent of the businesswomen and 12 per cent of the craftswomen were the daughters of business- or craftsmen, the businesswomen in particular had through their trade been able to improve their social status. The results suggest that these women benefited from the commercial opportunities of their time and not from having a father in business.

The German voluntary association (hereafter in German the Verein, or Vereine in the plural) played an important role in the evolution of German society in the later nineteenth century and in the first third of the twentieth. This sort of association (or male bourgeois club) was a cornerstone of European Enlighenment society at the end of the eighteenth century, of the liberal society of the Vormärz, and of the German political parties in the years 1848–1849. Furthermore, the Verein was one of the main characteristics in the rise and hegemony of German bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century, and one of the cornerstones of local society as it developed in Germany towards the end of the 1890s.

Research into the German Vereine is very advanced. To this day, historical research continues to benefit from Thomas Nipperdeys' breakthrough article concerning the importance of the Vereine in the rise of bourgeois-liberal society prior to 1848. Otto Dann, Wolfgang Hardtwig, and Dieter Düding have expanded our knowledge concerning the importance of the Vereine for the rise of bourgeois nationalism and liberalism before 1848. Regional studies have also emphasized these aspects during the Vormärz period and after.

Folklorist-anthropological research is indebted to Hermann Bausinger's article on the importance of the connection between the Vereine and the development of German folklore. Similarly, Max Weber paved the way for the sociological research on the Vereine that has flourished since the 1860s, led by sociologists such as Hans Jürgen Siewert and Gerhard Wurzbacher. These are the two dominant streams in current research of the Vereine, although it is beyond the scope of this article to explore them here.

This article addresses the management of maritime plunder and conflict in the waters of England and France in the fourteenth century. It argues that during this century a fundamental change occurred. Around 1300, maritime conflict was handled by recourse to the strictly civil law merchant and law maritime, or by Marcher law. However by the 1350s and 1360s the kings of England and France, moved by contemporary political events and theories of sovereignty at sea, created courts of Admiralty that challenged the previous systems’ jurisdiction. These initiatives eventually paved the way for the criminalisation of private maritime conflict.

This article is devoted to an analysis of Algerian court cases. It focuses on family law in practice, in order to shed light on the disputed character of this realm of law and the ambiguity involved in its reform. The aim of the article is to question the assumption of an intrinsic opposition between the (traditional/Muslim) family on the one hand, and (modern) state law on the other. It will be argued that the legal regulation of the family, far from being simply imposed by the state, represents a dynamic process in which different actors with different interests and orientations partake. The material used consists mainly of decisions taken by the Algerian Supreme Court covering the period from 1963 (the year of the its creation) to 1990.

‘A woman who has had an illegitimate child is looked on with contempt, and would not be associated with. But the young women have a great deal of discretion, and few of them go astray in that way.’

Parish of St. Mary's, Cork, 1835

While the claim may seem surprising, Irish society enjoys no mean place in the history of sexuality. Malthus may be said to have re-focused attention on the folly of giving free rein to the passion between the sexes, and some historians, as well as contemporary commentators, viewed the state of pre-Famine Ireland as a confirmation of the dangers of runaway population growth. Post-Famine Irish society, by contrast, gave the appearance of being fashioned according to the principles of Malthusian population policy: an older age at marriage for men and women, a rising incidence of permanent celibacy and a relative absence of ‘vice’. Indeed, long before the end of the Victorian era Irish people were renowned for their prudential approach to matters sexual. This extended to sex outside marriage. Irish illegitimacy rates were amongst the lowest in the Western world. Ideologues protested the virtue and purity of Irish women, and of the Irish race more generally.

The settlement of structural commercial conflicts of interest cannot be exclusively subsumed under the heading of dispute resolution. Even when a particular conflict opposing specific individuals or groups of interests could be settled, the broader underlying conflicts of interest would subsist and re-emerge. Both commercial and institutional or political actors would therefore rely on various techniques of conflict management, a process imposing restraint on the opposing parties while allowing sufficient leeway for business to be continued. Both conflict resolution and conflict management were devices of public and corporate governance, and therefore, following the late medieval tradition, instruments more or less based on established patterns of legal or quasi-legal models legitimised by accepted or conventional parameters of ‘justice’.

In nineteenth-century Canada, a Census was conducted every ten years, beginning in 1851. Historians have tried to use the information in the local, provincial, and national Censuses to determine the rate of mortality and causes of death. The mortality statistics are thought to be reliable after 1921, but practical as well as conceptual problems interfere with attempts to establish retrospective mortality patterns using the nineteenth-century Census. In this paper, I will review the problems with this source on mortality. I will then compare the Census data with that derived from a study of a physician's daybooks, focusing on four specific areas of discrepancy and the possible reasons for the differences. Finally, I will suggest that the combined use of both types of sources may challenge some durable assumptions and could help to establish more reliable estimates of mortality patterns.

This article charts the long-term development of seigneurial governance within the principality of Guelders in the Low Countries. Proceeding from four quantitative cross-sections (c. 1325, 1475, 1540, 1570) of seigneurial lordships, the conclusion is that seigneurial governance remained stable in late medieval Guelders. The central argument is that this persistence of seigneurial governance was an effect of active collaboration between princely administrations, lords, and local communities. Together, the princely government and seigneuries of Guelders formed an integrated, yet polycentric, state. The article thereby challenges the narrative of progressive state centralisation that predominates in the historiography of pre-modern state formation.

In this article, I compare women's work opportunities in Bilbao, in northern Castile, and Antwerp, in the Low Countries, from 1400 to 1560. I argue that the different organisation of work in the two towns had a great influence on women's economic opportunities. Whereas women in Antwerp often worked alongside other members of their household because of the town's dominant craft guilds, Bilbao's informal trades were open to women on their own, independent of their husband or another male relative. As a result, women in Bilbao are more visible in the sources and were able to exert more influence on the town council.

This article focuses on the role played by local mobility in processes of confession and community building, taking the Catholic population in seventeenth-century Palestine as a case study. Works on the Reformation in Europe have acknowledged a connection between the strengthening of confessional identities and geographical mobility. Through the analysis of the parish records of Bethlehem, the article reveals some characteristics of seventeenth-century Catholic mobility in Palestine and shows how this mobility was bound up with the consolidation of a tiny Catholic minority and the establishment of a sacramental network. From a larger perspective, this research suggests that mobility plays an important role in the development and consolidation of small communities in a context of competing religion. From a methodological point of view, it also shows the importance of microanalysis in understanding the geographical mobility associated with religious practices and allegiances.