The memory of the people : custom and popular senses of the past in early modern England / Andy Wood.
Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013Description: 1 online resource (xiii, 396 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)Content type:- text
- computer
- online resource
- 9781139034739 (ebook)
- 340.5/709420903 23
- KD8896 .W66 2013

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
Reformation, custom and the end of medieval England -- Custom and popular memory -- Rights, resources, and social alignments -- Topographies of remembrance -- Textual and verbal ways of remembering -- The politics of popular memory -- Epilogue: resources of hope: working-class memory in rural England.
Did ordinary people in early modern England have any coherent sense of the past? Andy Wood's pioneering new book charts how popular memory generated a kind of usable past that legitimated claims to rights, space and resources. He explores the genesis of customary law in the medieval period; the politics of popular memory; local identities and traditions; gender and custom; literacy, orality and memory; landscape, space and memory; and the legacy of this cultural world for later generations. Drawing from a wealth of sources ranging from legal proceedings and parochial writings to proverbs and estate papers, he shows how custom formed a body of ideas built up generation after generation from localized patterns of cooperation and conflict. This is a unique account of the intimate connection between landscape, place and identity and of how the poorer and middling sort felt about the world around them.