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With individual chapters written by leading experts in the period, \"The New Penguin History of Scotland\" illuminates the many ways in which the nation's history has shaped its national identity. 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Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the peoples of northern England, Lowland Scotland, and Wales used extensive celebrations at events such as marriage, along with reciprocal exchange of gifts, to emote a sense of belonging to their locality. Bride Ales and Penny Weddings looks at regionally distinctive practices of giving and receiving wedding gifts, in order to understand social networks and community attitudes.  Examining a wide variety of sources over four centuries, the volume examines contributory weddings, where guests paid for their own entertainment and gave money to the couple, to suggest a new view of the societies of 'middle Britain', and re-interpret social and cultural change across Britain. These regions were not old fashioned, as is commonly assumed, but differently fashioned, possessing social priorities that set them apart both from the south of England and from 'the Celtic fringe'. This volume is about informal communities of people whose aim was maintaining and enhancing social cohesion through sociability and reciprocity. Communities relied on negotiation, compromise, and agreement, to create and re-create consensus around more-or-less shared values, expressed in traditions of hospitality and generosity. Ranging across issues of trust and neighbourliness, recreation and leisure, eating and drinking, order and authority, personal lives and public attitudes, R. A. 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Part one examines the role of lordship in managing social and economic relationships following suicide and illuminates the importance of distinctive punishments inflicted on suicides' bodies for understanding historic communities. The second part of the book places suicide in its cultural context, analysing the attitudes of early modern people to those who killed themselves. It explores religious beliefs and the place of the devil as well as secular and medical understandings of suicide's causes in sources that include provincial newspapers.Informed by continental as well as British research, Punishing the Dead? explicitly compares England and Scotland, making this a completely British history. 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Our understanding of demographic history in the period before the Industrial Revolution has been transformed. The amount of literature which has been produced is daunting both in its volume and its complexity. In this concise volume for students Dr Houston reviews the literature and explains the different population trends evident in parts of Britain and Ireland. He sets out the sometimes complex interactions between fertility, nuptiality, morality and migration in a clear and comprehensible way, and explains why the mechanisms which balanced population and resources in England were not found in Scotland and Ireland.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52132273979665,"sku":"NLS9780521552776","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521552776.jpg?v=1757516471"},{"product_id":"scottish-literacy-and-the-scottish-identity-book-r-a-houston-9780521890885","title":"Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity","description":"Scottish education and literacy have achieved a legendary status. A campaign promoted by church and state between 1560 and 1696 is said to have produced the most literate population in the early modern world. 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