List of illustrations; List of tables; Notes on contributors; Preface; Prologue: Lawrence Stone - as seen by others; 1. The myth and the man Julian Mitchell; 2. The enfant terrible? C. S. L. Davies; 3. 'Il Magnifico' Miriam Slater; 4. The eminence rouge? John M. Murrin; Part I. The Crown, The Aristocracy and The Gentry: 5. Lineage and kin in the sixteenth-century aristocracy: some comparative evidence on England and Germany Judith J. Hurwich; 6. Public ceremony and royal charisma: the English royal gentry in London, 1485–1642 R. M. Smuts; 7. County governance and elite withdrawal in Norfolk, 1660–1720 James M. Rosenheim; 8. The last Hanoverian sovereign?: the Victorian monarchy in historical perspective, 1688–1988 David Cannadine; 9. The gentrification of Victorian and Edwardian industrialists Richard Trainor; Part II. Power and Social Relations: 10. Poverty and progress in early modern England A. L. Beier; 11. Ambiguity and contradiction in 'the rise of professionalism': the English clergy, 1570–1730 Michael Hawkins; 12. Bourgeois revolution and transition to capitalism Robert Brenner; 13. Crowds, carnival and the state in English executions, 1604–1868 Thomas W. Laqueur; 14. Interpersonal conflict and social tension: civil litigation in England, 1640–1830 C. W. Brooks; 15. Church and state allied: the failure of parliamentary reform of the universities, 1688–1800 John Gascoigne; Part III. Urban Society and Social Change: 16. Resistance to change: the political elites of provincial towns during the English Revolution Roger Howell, Jr; 17. The London Wings and the Exclusion Crisis reconsidered Gary S. De Krey; 18. Cultural life in the provinces: Leeds and York, 1720–1820 J. Jefferson Looney; 19. The dynamics of class formation in nineteenth-century Bradford Theodore Koditschek; 20. The community perspective in family history: the Potteries during the nineteenth century Marguerite Dupree; Epilogue; Appendix; Index.