Introduction

Until the mid-1970s the historiography of early modern society was structured around the notion of crisis. Since that time historians have increasingly concentrated upon the themes of continuity and stability in the period between roughly 1550 and 1750.1 That later interpretation is now experiencing its own crisis. The historiographical emphasis on continuity and a latent anti-Marxism formed two of the central organizing themes of the “new”social history of early modern England. The central assumptions of that recent emphasis are now being fast eroded in the face of the apparent collapse of both conventional modernist historical periodization and of Marxist meta-narratives. There is now a need not only to dismantle old and perhaps inaccurate interpretations, but to rebuild historical explanation in the period.2