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Why was an ideal of elite women's virtue promoted in London c. 1580-1630, and why was it based on their reformed piety and charity? To what extent can elite women's piety and charity reveal their religious identity, among an elite characterised as 'puritan' by contemporaries and historians? How did women practise piety and charity in a worldly City, and did they share a civic ethos? This thesis engages with historiographies of urban history, the history of charity and hospitality, and gender history. It concerns over 400 wives and widows of the 331 aldermen elected 1540-1630, and uses 78 widows' wills. Women's wills are analysed qualitatively save to consider widows' public charitable bequests. From preambles to exceptionally diffuse bequests, wills are an intimate source for studying women's religious identity through their piety and charity. They reveal women's understanding of their gender in a patriarchal society that fostered an attitude of sorority that is particularly evident in women's charity and hospitality. To study the piety and charity of aldermen's wives extra-testamentary personal evidence complements the wills. Sources written by women themselves include a household book used to reconstruct a woman's charity and hospitality, portraits, devotional works and letters. Sources of praise and abuse authored by men including Stow's Survay, funeral sermons, verse libel and verbal abuse are used to reconstruct ideals and antitypes of elite female virtue and hypocrisy, and are read critically in comparison with other sources to furnish evidence of female piety and social conduct. Chapter II-VII focus on the conforming female elite, comparing contemporary discussion of female piety, charity and religious identity to women's lives and practice in the household and the community, and Chapter VIII considers three Catholic women to ask to what extent the civic ethos shared by reformed City women could accommodate even their recusant kinswomen.

Women in early modem England were expected to marry, and then to become housewives. Despite the fact that nearly fifty percent of the population was in this position, little is known of the expectations and realities of these English housewives. This thesis examines both the expectations and actual lives of middling sort and gentry women in England between 1500 and 1640.

Extensive witchcraft trials took place in Sweden between the years 1668 and 1676. Approximately three hundred individuals were executed during a period of very few years. However, far more common were trials of a more modest nature, concerning minor magic and malevolent witchcraft without aspects of diabolism. The present dissertation deals with these minor cases, which have previously attracted very little academic interest. The source material for this study comprises 353 cases (involving 880 individuals), submitted to the Göta Royal Superior Court by informants during the period 1635-1754. The area of jurisdiction covered by the Göta Royal Superior Court embraced the southernmost areas of Sweden. This study discusses witchcraft and magic trials from three perspectives: 1. The elite perspective (the acculturation model); 2. The functionalistic conflict perspective; and 3. The systems-oriented perspective of popular magic. Ideologically and religiously coloured perceptions of magic became more pervasive at the same time as the number of trials increased. This was caused by central administrative measures, which broadened the opportunities for pursuing cases on the local level. However, the increased influence of the dite cannot be characterized as a conquest of folk culture by the elite. It is more adequate to speak of a movement of repression, originating in a state become all the more civilized. Death sentences were few and far between and most of the cases concerned minor magic. There existed no independent popular level such as emerges in the reports from the proceedings of the trials. People clearly differentiated between different types of malevolent witchcraft when standing before the courts. They were more likely to go directly to trial when the signs preceding their misfortunes hinted at magical activity (viewed as sorcery), than they were when suspicions against witches were based on threats made in conflict situations. Witchcraft which had its basis in conflict situations appears to have been more dependent upon first receiving encouragement in the form of obliging courts, before people would take their cases to trial. This has created a pattern which ostensibly makes it seem that the level of social tensions was low, so that people therefore appeared indifferent toward malevolent witchcraft. Just as illusory is the competing image of an uninfluenced popular perception of witchcraft which actually emerges in the Göta Royal Superior Court. However, this does not mean that the actions of individuals was characterized by an assimilation of the values of the dominant culture. Receptivity to the signals of the elite was certainly clear, but at the same time the responses indicate a great deal of independence. Popular participation in witchcraft trials took place without any prerequisite profound cultural transformations. / digitalisering@umu

For over four hundred years historians and theologians have been unable to come to a consensus as to where Johann Arndt (1555-1621) fits on the spectrum of orthodoxy in the Lutheran church, what age he best represented, and how he should be understood. Arndt has been credited with reviving medieval mysticism, as being a subversive innovator within the Lutheran church, and as being the father of Pietism. All of this confusion seems to come from the variegated nature of his work. Arndt was willing and able to borrow from a variety of traditions as he sought to revive the church of the Reformation on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War. This work is an investigation into the private world of Arndt through his correspondence as he wrote to individuals with varying theological temperaments. In a sense this thesis follows the pioneering work of Friedrich Arndt, who attempted in 1838 to investigate Arndt’s self-understanding on the basis of his correspondence; his work, however, was severely limited by the fact that only ten letters were known at the time. The Verzeichnis der gedruckten Briefe deutscher Autoren des 17. Jahrhunderts published in 2002 listed twenty-three known letters of Arndt. For my research and using the footnotes and appendices of secondary literature on Arndt and with help from the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha, I have collected fifty-two letters written by Arndt. This work is the first to treat the letters exhaustively and proposes to present a fuller biographical picture of Arndt and to explore his self-understanding as a prophet of spiritual renewal in the Lutheran church.

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In his evocative account of walking through Restoration London, the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys conveys a vibrant city comprised of movement, exchange, and conflict. We follow Pepys, for example, into the coffee-house on his insatiable search for news and political argument. Within urban space he is equally persistent, noting the ritual demarcation of urban boundaries at moments of tension between London and the Crown, or describing how the city's spaces were alarmingly transformed by the presence of disease. This is hardly the London imagined by scholars of the Restoration, who have characterized this historical moment of the return of Charles II and restoration of monarchical government to England as a time of concord after the violent struggles resulting in civil war at mid-century. It is telling that one of the first strategies adopted by Charles IPs government to stabilize a volatile situation in London was to assert control over print. At this moment, though, print culture served to open up urban space in new ways, becoming a mode of opportunity for individuals like Pepys. My dissertation considers precisely the interrelation between these spaces and forms of print. Like Pepys, my thesis journeys through the city, stopping at the Restoration coffee-house. These spaces of congregation, where print was displayed and purchased, appeared in significant numbers around the Royal Exchange after 1660. The coffee-house has been given mythic proportions in the twentieth century as the foundation of a modern public sphere. However, as this thesis will show, instead of producing an abstract and universal realm of public opinion, the coffee-house was an actual space formed through contestation, and through a struggle taking place between an older form of subjectivity and a newer urban culture. Another site of urban contestation shaped through print was the street processions staged by Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis, a moment of increased City and Crown tensions. Within these political struggles, the unexpected also had its part to play. The crisis brought on by bubonic plague in 1665 generated prints mediating all kinds of conflicts, but especially the social practices of flight and quarantine. The sudden destruction of the city within the walls by fire in 1666 was met by mapping and picturing the ruins that struggled to account for the void in the urban centre. My dissertation concludes with a series of unique prints which represent an ephemeral city built on the in-between space of the frozen Thames. This unexpected suspension of the everyday rhythms of London led to its festive re-imagining. In conclusion, I address the significance of the location of both print and the coffeehouse at the very centre of this urban space.

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The autonomy of the shari` a courts in Ottoman-Egypt during the 16th and 17th centuries, is the subject of this thesis. Specifically, it pursues the question of formalization (the incorporation of courts and their functionaries into the civil apparatus of the state) and, relatedly, the legal innovations which accompanied this policy (the merger of siyasa to shari `a and the development of the qanun ), gauging the implications of both for the judiciaries independence from the state. With regards to procedural law, it finds the courts to be the autonomous domain of its practitioners, muftis and qadis, while concluding that formalization renders the efficacy of the courts dependent on the fortunes of the state. With respect to the two innovations described above, it finds that in the contemplative realm of law, the manipulations of the state spurred certain legal trends without affording the state a place in the domain of law.

Through the evidence of the court records (sijill s), this dissertation examines the interplay between Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), codified sultanic law (qanun ) and customary law in the shari`a courts of Ottoman-Cairo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The thesis forwarded suggests that custom was a declining source of law in these centuries as a result of two factors: the imposition of a codified qanun, and a redacted fiqh. / Conflict between Egyptian and Ottoman jurists, a well-documented feature of the sixteenth century, is often depicted as a by-product of the tension between qanun and fiqh. Questioning this framework of analysis, this study views the conflict between Egyptian jurists and their Ottoman counterparts as an exemplar of 'antagonistic shari`as.' The Ottoman shari`a, defined by 'universalism,' entailed a redacted fiqh in which Ḥanafism was privileged above the other schools of law, and a qanun in which sultanic customs were imposed in lieu of local custom. The 'Egyptian shari`a,' on the other hand, was defined by pluralism as it envisioned parity between the schools of law while upholding the role of local custom over and above the authority of the imported qanun¯. At the core of this antagonism, therefore, are two cross-cutting predispositions: one, a propensity for legal orthodoxy; and, two, a propensity (on the part of the Egyptian judiciary) to retain the traditional features of Islamic legal orthopraxy. / At the heart of the state's endeavour to construct a legal orthodoxy was a desire to promote a model of 'correct outward conduct' that would generate cultural parity between the empire's myriad ethnic communities. Such an undertaking fostered more than a growing social homogeneity, however. Positioned as the final arbiters of social justice and morality, the state and its courts were able to realign the social contract between the state and its subjects to strengthen the ties binding the individual to the state while weakening communal bonds. In the final analysis, the increasingly assimilative role of an Ottoman-defined shari`a over local custom, diminished the communities' roles in the arbitration of justice and led to the making of a proto-citizen in the Ottoman Empire.