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Drawing on an extraordinary wealth of court records from Middlesex County of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, Sex in Middlesex offers a richly revisionist account of social and moral life in seventeenth-century New England. Social historian Roger Thompson brings to life the forgotten men and women of colonial Massachusetts to challenge some of the most entrenched assumptions about Puritan society. Examining cases of fornication, adultery, breach of promise, premarital pregnancy, and sexual deviance recorded between 1649 and 1699, Thompson argues that the Puritan social system was far less rigid, and the relations between the sexes far less coercively regulated, than the dominant historiographical tradition, shaped by scholars such as Perry Miller and Lawrence Stone, has suggested.

Rather than a community defined by patriarchal tyranny and punitive moral control, Thompson discovers in the Middlesex records a society characterized by a striking degree of tolerance, mutual regard, and practical common sense, animated by a genuinely popular Puritan piety. The goal of the courts was not punishment and exclusion, but confession, reform, and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Structured with methodological rigor and written with narrative verve, Sex in Middlesex is at once a work of quantitative social history and a gallery of vivid individual portraits.

A compact history of the parish of St George Hanover Square in London.

The parish of St George Hanover Square encompasses the wealthy London neighborhoods of Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico, as well as part of Hyde Park. This book relates the history of the parish, from its inception in 1725 to its abolition with the establishment of the London County Council in 1900. The area was transformed through rapid urbanization from largely undeveloped fields on the western fringe of London into one of the most affluent parts of the metropolis, with developments centered on a series of grand squares, including Hanover, Grosvenor, and Belgrave Squares. Through detailed thematic treatments, the book explores the local government of the vestry, as well as institutions such as schools and charities and St George’s Hospital, which is now based in South London. The wider political culture and the economy of the parish are also given their due, from the aristocrats and servants of Mayfair to the industries on the bank of the Thames, including factories and a distillery. Finally, it covers the religious life of the parish, the erection of new churches and chapels, and its division into ecclesiastical parishes and subdistricts as its population boomed in the nineteenth century.