Recent scholarship has suggested that villagers participated in the general proliferation of goods that seems to have occurred in late medieval Europe. How and why they did so is far from clear. This article addresses this issue through a case study of pottery consumption (with particular attention to earthenware) in late medieval rural Valencia. A quantitative analysis of 251 probate inventories (1280s–1450s) supports the argument that not only did medieval villagers acquire more of these goods, but also that the reasons behind such a process challenge many of the traditional interpretations of changes in consumption patterns.

Although ownership of real property was crucial to the economic opportunities of medieval urban women, few studies systematically investigate the gender distribution of medieval real property over time. Using censiers (rarely used sources), this article approaches this question through a socio-geographical analysis of Brussels. The study finds that, despite the region's egalitarian inheritance laws, female ownership of real property was relatively limited, and it declined during the late Middle Ages. This decrease accelerated during economic crises, and especially affected the property of non-elite women. Further research on the changing economic opportunities of medieval women would benefit from a more explicit discussion of non-labour income sources and social status.

According to the literature inspired by the ideas of Robert Brenner, leaseholders, small farmers and craftsmen did not participate in the local administration of those districts in the Dutch Republic where the majority of land was owned by large landowners. However, in this article we show that, at least in the Dutch river clay area, where water management was an essential part of the population's struggle to survive the annual floods, the battle against the elements induced people, regardless of their property relations and social distinctions, to share power in order to overcome the challenges they all faced. The study also contributes to the growing literature about the effects of water management on political culture in the North Sea area.

Galicia is a region located in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, where, historically, illegitimacy was often high compared with levels elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, Galicia's coastal and inland areas have always differed greatly in terms of farming structure, population growth, migration patterns, family types and inheritance systems. The aim of this article is to establish to what extent the trends in and levels of illegitimacy between 1570 and 1899 were influenced by these different historical contexts. It also offers an in-depth examination of unmarried mothers, showing that the trend towards bearing more than one illegitimate child rose over time. Ultimately, the article argues that illegitimacy is best studied at a local or regional level, rather than at the macro level that historians have often employed elsewhere in Europe.

This article investigates the demographic history of the Grand Sable sugar estate on nineteenth-century St Vincent. Exceptionally for a Caribbean plantation, Grand Sable's enslaved population achieved natural increase (a surplus of births over deaths). Pro-slavery campaigners seized on this achievement to support the cause of gradualist amelioration and to oppose metropolitan regulation of slavery, especially emancipation. Explanations of demographic success advanced by opponents of abolition are found wanting and alternatives proposed that are more consistent with the surviving evidence. The role played by anomalies in shaping discourse on both sides of the slavery debate is highlighted.