Lawrence Stone Livres

Covering a period of three and a half centuries between two great upheavals in landed society--the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Agricultural Depression--this highly-acclaimed study examines the traditional view that for centuries English landed society has been open to infiltrationby families made newly rich through trade, office, or the professions. The Stones focus on the landed elite of Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, and the Northumberland counties, combining case histories and examples with in-depth research to test the historical validity of one of the most cherishedbeliefs about English society, economics, and politics. For this abridged edition, the authors have retained the essential contents of the original hardcover while omitting the supporting scholarly aparatus.

"In Road to Divorce, Lawrence Stone explored the different ways in which marriage took place, and analysed the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the legality of the institution in its various forms before the Marriage Act of 1753. He now shows in absorbing detail, through a series of case-studies, how courting and marrying couples tended to manoeuvre around the ambiguities of the law, and how they sometimes became entangled in a web of moral and legal contradiction leading to personal catastrophe. There are stories about unwise courtship, prenuptial pregnancies, forced marriages by parents or parish officials, bigamy, clandestine marriages often performed in haste in peculiarly squalid circumstances and repented at leisure. These fascinating studies reveal in intimate, often ribald, detail how men and women adjusted their sexual conduct, moral attitudes, and matrimonial plans to suit an ambiguous legal situation." "Professor Stone has traced the ways in which, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demands by individuals for love and affection were starting to take precedence over family interests and parental dictation in the search for a spouse; the studies he has drawn from court records for Uncertain Unions enable us to see this great moral transition being played out in the lives of men and women, often in their own words. These are vivid, human histories, presented in revealing detail, by a leading historian of the family."--Jacket

This fascinating book describes an 'heroic phase' in the writing of history - the last thirty years.

Contains much the best all-round analysis of the causes of the English Revolution that we have. It synthesizes and makes sense of the research of a whole generation of scholars.

Made by Lawrence Stone himself, this abridgement of his highly-regarded study omits many statistical details not needed by the non-specialized reader. It presents a new interpretation of the long-term social changes leading up to the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century.

* The first full study of a topic rich in historical interest and contemporary importance Despite the infamous divorce of Henry VIII in 1529, subsequent moral, political, and religious attitudes ensured that until 1857, England was the only Protestant country with virtually no facilities for full divorce on the grounds of adultery, desertion, or cruelty. Using a mass of transcribed legal testimonies, taken from hitherto unexplored court records, Professor Stone uncovers the means by which laity and lawyers reformed the divorce laws, and offers astonishingly frank and intimate insights into our ancestors' changing views about what makes a marriage. Using personal accounts in which witnesses speak freely about their moral attitudes towards love, sex, adultery, and marriage, Lawrence Stone reveals, for the first time, the full and complex story of how English men and women have contrived to use, twist, or defy the law in order to deal with marital breakdown.

Family histories of the Cecils, Earls of Salisbury, 1490-1733; the Manners, Earls of Rutland, 1460-1660; and the Wriothesleys, Earls of Southampton, 1530-1667.

This book studies the evolution of the family from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and how the process radically influenced child-rearing, education, contraception, sexual behaviour and marriage.