Late Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh

A thematically structured, technically ground-breaking demographic analysis of an important early-modern European city. Each chapter addresses an aspect of urban life: the household and family; wealth and taxation; employment; the position of women; care of the poor. Throughout the book runs the constant theme of 'urban-ness' in relation to the different social and economic structures of the parishes of Edinburgh. The strength of this book lies in the breadth of the range of sources that the author has exploited - Poll Tax and Health Tax registers, testaments, burial registers and town council, Kirk and craft records; in the sophisticated techniques used to marshal this prodigious amount of information to construct a coherent and readable account of city life; and in its subject - this is one of a very few urban-historical demographic studies of the period not to be based on an English city.