This volume crosses geographical as well as chronological divides in order to emphasise the mutability of the social margins, making an important contribution to research on social and urban history by considering a variety of groups identified as "marginal." Focusing on two key themes in relation to these groups - the language of marginality and the spaces of the margins - the volume counters the trend in the existing historiography to discuss the social margins either as a single, undifferentiated group or separate, unconnected ones, instead examining the effect that changing perceptions of social position had in shaping the spaces in which people worked, lived, or worshipped.

1. Introduction

[Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw]

Part I: Health

2. Marginal Bodies and Minds: Responses to Leprosy and Mental Disorders in Late Medieval Normandy

[Elma Brenner]

3. "Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour": Disability and "Marginality" in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

[David M. Turner]

Part II: The Law

4. Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice

[Sara M. Butler]

5. Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration: William Herbert's Considerations in the Behalf of Foreiners (1662)

[Andrew Spicer]

Part III: Work

6. Down But Not Out: A Case Study in Early Modern Social Mobility from the Margins

[Joel F. Harrington]

7. The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain

[Carmen Fracchia]

8. The Margins in the Centre: Working Around Rialto in Sixteenth-Century Venice

[Rosa M. Salzberg]

Part IV: Morality and the Home

9. Cleaning up the Renaissance City: The Symbolic and Physical Place of the Genoese Brothel in Urban Society

[Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw]

10. Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault: Compromised Chastity, Marginalized Lives?

[Sarah Toulalan]

11. Afterword: Constructing Marginality in the Early Modern European City

[Fabrizio Nevola]

Andrew Spicer is Professor of Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University and a Literary Director of the Royal Historical Society.

Jane Stevens Crawshaw is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of History, Oxford Brookes University.