This book is an investigation of youth and adolescence in pre-industrial England. It concentrates on young people from the middle or lower groups of society, who, between 1500 and 1800, left home to work as apprentices, agricultural labourers or in domestic service. Drawing on municipal, ecclesiastical and parish records, and over 70 autobiographies, Ben-Amos focusses on aspects of youth as they related to maturation: the separation of adolescents from their parents; their working lives and relationships with their employers or masters and mistresses; the relative independence and autonomy exercised by younger women; the role of the young in religious affairs; and the question of whether there was such as thing as a "youth subculture".
- ISBN10 0300055978
- ISBN13 9780300055979
- Publish Date 25 May 1994
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 20 March 2013
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English