... the social benefits of employing common men in large-scale seafaring projects, the ballads explore the consequences of the common sailor’s presence—and most particularly, his prolonged absence—on the traditional stabilizing structures of family and community. In doing so, the ballads critically examine...

... convents, usually ones with no family connections, demonstrating a preference for postmortem association not with family but with a community of celibate women. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 noble Italian women and gender death and burial early modern wills and inheritance...

..., printers, and readers scrambled to restore paratexts soon thereafter. Among the readers who marked up their bibles was Thomas Marwood, a later seventeenth-century tutor for a Catholic gentry family. Investigating how Marwood creatively imitated the scholastics' dense theological commentary and opposed...

...David R. Como This article examines the “conversions” and confessions of Giles Creech, a London cutler who allegedly passed through “fourteen several religions” during his youth in early Stuart London. In 1638 Creech furnished the authorities with a detailed dossier on furtive communities...

..., defied religious teachings, and ruptured social relations within family and community. Kill- ing oneself incurred the threat of eternal damnation and hence was roundly condemned by medieval and early modern churchmen.5 At the same time, 54  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 45.1...

..., and it is here that the interplay between politics at the everyday, local, familial, or community level and those at the level of kingdoms or empires becomes important for a consideration of gender. Gayle Rubin’s concept of the sex/gender system is useful here.14 Though well known to medievalists...

... England. Later Medieval Europe, vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xiii, 286 pp.; 4 illus. $130.00. Casey, James. Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570 – 1739. New Studies in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. viii, 322 pp.; 3 maps. $90.00...

... of life, but he called them as individuals. He called them out of their families and communities of birth, out of the traditions in which they had been formed, into a new community. He called them to follow him freely, and patiently endured the rejection of those who did not answer the call. He...

..., recounted from his point of view (that of women is exceedingly rare), yet necessarily in relationship to social context, personal reputation, and kin, family, and community. As such, pardon let- ters are textual performances, collaboratively authored, that require complex reading practices...

... Petrosillo University of California, Davis Davis, California In 1569 Costanza Colonna, a thirteen-­year-­old Italian girl from a prominent family, gave birth to a stillborn fetus, stunning the world of her family and community. The young girl’s...

..., and dozen or so children moved into an abandoned rural estate in Huntingdonshire and set about repairing the chapel, which had last been used as a pigsty. The community numbered about thirty: the extended family, plus schoolteach- ers for Latin, mathematics, and music; four poor women for whom...

... collected in Laud Misc. 416 in some ways as good a fit for the Brigittines’ library as for the Tiptoft family’s library. Syon was, though, by no means unique as a monastic community closely involved in high-­ level international political affairs. Claire Walker’s essay reveals that English nuns...

... a part in embracing the poor and vagrant into their alehouse home.11 The alehouse, then, offered its guests a touch of community and family—a sense of having “come home.” This may well have been the prime attraction of alehouses for the home-less. But such a comforting experience, as the above...

...-distance communication, providing the latest news from the front. This article provides the first examination of letter-writing soldiers as purveyors of news from the battlefield to the governing elites in Italian states during the late sixteenth century. It examines how soldiers of different ranks...

... to apply to the individual and to be bad but inevitable in a society of advancement and preferment,” adding, “In the Jewish case, the inside was defined not only as the individual and his or her family but also the wider Jewish community. In the historical circumstances of the exile, the contrast...

... epiphany. Rather, neophytes were introduced to a community of believers, often through personal or familial ties, and only then embarked on a long process of self-­education about the religion they had already ritually embraced. Christian Ottoman subjects in such narratives rarely describe...

... family was constituted by a community of heirs; each member, regardless of sex and age, had an equal claim on paternal and maternal wealth available through inheritance. Although the fueros of Castile and León in force in this period sought to guarantee...

... with a traumatic amputation, as a loving daughter is cut off from family and community by her proud, unseeing father. The language through which Lear severs Cordelia from his royal body is apocalyptic: he commands that she be utterly disengaged from the structures of love that knit human communities together...

... Adam Smyth Balliol College Oxford, United Kingdom Meanwhile the blades of the scissors do not snap but glide. —Tom Phillips on Henri Matisse Of the many fictions that have circulated about the Anglican community of Little Gidding...

... to the communal palace. As armed troops dispersed the crowds, Tommaso was handed over to the executioner to be returned to the Podestà’s Palace for his execution. As all this was happening, a few hundred boys assaulted Tommaso’s family home, breaking in and attempting to set it on fire while calling out...