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CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 The first social and cultural history of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, this book combines sources from across England and the Atlantic world to describe the shifting and desperate experiences of the very poorest and most marginalized of people in early modernity; the outcasts, the wandering destitute, the disabled veteran, the aged labourer, the solitary pregnant woman on the road and those referred to as vagabonds and beggars are all explored in this comprehensive account of the subject. Using a rich array of archival and literary sources, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 offers a history not only of the experiences of vagrants themselves, but also of how the settled ''better sort'' perceived vagrancy, how it was culturally represented in both popular and elite literature as a shadowy underworld of dissembling rogues, gypsies, and pedlars, and how these representations powerfully affected the lives of vagrants themselves.Hitchcock''s is an important study for all scholars and students interested in the social and cultural history of early modern England.>
About the author
David Hitchcock is Lecturer in History at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick, UK, where he co-ordinates the Warwick Network for Parish Research & serves as an academic lead of the Global Research Priority on Food. His publications include Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (2007) and Imperial Villages: Cultures of Political Freedom in the German Lands (2019). He is also the (co-)editor of A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (2012), Pfarreien in der Vormoderne (2017) and The European World 1500-1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (4th edn, 2023).Brian Cowan is Associate Professor of History at McGill University, Canada. His publications include The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), and The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012). He contributed to the Multigraph Collective's Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation (2018). He is also the (co-)editor of The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (2021) and President of the Board of Directors for the international research group 'Sociabilities in the Long Eighteenth Century'.
