Social Geographies in England (1200-1640)

An attempt is made to understand the relationships between social groups and the spaces and places which they inhabited. There have been for some time historians who have been concerned about the relationship between society and space/place (more so the latter). Some have chosen to approach the rhetoric of representations of space and place, in the cultural vein; others have focused on the experience of space and place, the social and the political. The two were not, of course, separable, and all historians have been sensitive to the interdependencies. In this book, an attempt is made to begin to understand the relationships between different social groups and social categories with the spaces and places which they inhabited and moved through and whether or not in their life-courses they were able to make an attachment to place. The book engages with different social groups, different times, and different spaces and places-with that emphasis on the importance of difference. Its concern is with times before the beginnings of modernity.