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Simon Szreter's remarkable and very important book argues, in effect, that coincidence has deceived the historians of family sexuality in the period 1860 - 1960. The birth-rate per family in England and Wales declined ever more steeply in this hundred yea r period, and it declined with roughly the same timing and speed in most other European countries.
All scholars are pleased when their toils receive critical appreciation from respected colleagues and I am most grateful to Michael Mason for his generous response to my work. In replying, it may first be relevant to mention how my approach to the sub ject arose. As an undergraduate I took the paper in demographic and family history taught by the staff of the Cambridge Group.
Over the past decade growing numbers of students have undertaken research into the religious dimension of the recent history of the British Isles, and in doing so have expanded its agenda away from the traditional focus on the history of doctrine and ecclesiastical institutions.
It is difficult to comment on a set of observations as unerringly shrewd and self-evidently fair-minded as those offered by Dr Burns without capitulating either to defensiveness or to blandness, which is not, I imagine, what Reviews in History was designed to accomplish.
This is a wonderful book. It invites a range of responses: from engaged discussion, heated argument to personal reminiscences.
I am grateful to Helen Mellor for her careful reading and enthusiastic response to my book. She raises questions, which I will try to answer, about the agenda of my book, Eileen Power's contributions to medieval history, and the complic ations of gende r in writing the lives of female academics.
This is, by my count, the third collection of articles by Giles Constable published by Variorum; and it is a very welcome addition to the first two. Reprinted here are twelve essays, produced between 1982 and 1994. Several are easily available from other sources, but some would be harder to track down.
With the exception of pioneering work by Clarence Glacken , Keith Thomas and Alfred Crosby , very little has yet been written about early modern environmental thought . This has been partly determined by questions of definition .
When confronted with the term 'Illustrated' in a book title, how many historians, I wonder, would not be tempted to inwardly scoff and mentally store the book on the coffee table of their departmental common room? This review begins with a warning against such sentiments.
This book is an English translation by Mark Greengrass of a work first published in French in 1991 and is the companion volume to the author's earlier The Royal French State 1460-1610 (original French edn. 1987). Together the two books comprise the second and third volumes of Blackwell's five volume History of France which covers the period 987 to 1992.