The historiography of bankruptcy and insolvency in the early modern era focusses on merchants and banks. The position of landowning noble elites in insolvency procedures has less often been explored. The Lower Austrian Lamberg seigneurial archive contains rich documentation on the insolvency procedures against the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein – one of the largest landowning families in Lower Austria – between 1735 and 1768. Based on this source material, this article presents a case study treating the question of how political and judicial authorities in the Habsburg Empire dealt with insolvent aristocrats. The analysis is contextualized by a detailed reconstruction of the debt and asset structure of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein estate. The most important policy enacted to regulate the debt crisis of the noble landowners was ‘judicial administrations’ during which a judicial official took over the administration of the landed patrimony and other assets. Compared to official norms regarding insolvency procedures, creditors had little say in how the debtors’ property was managed, and measures were taken to partially preserve the debtors’ wealth and social status. The majority of creditors were nobles. Non-noble creditors also acquired bonds on less favourable legal terms and ended up as losers in the debt crisis.

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices, and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly. It does so through an examination of 195 petitions that apprentices or their supporters submitted to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, which sought the cancellation of their indentures on grounds of ‘immoderate correction’. It offers a quantitative overview of the surviving petitions, examining the proportion that featured allegations of violence, the terms and level of detail in which violence was described, and its relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to reconstruct the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints to legal authorities. Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, the material considered here suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. The final section considers what implications this might have for our understandings of violence, gender and apprenticeship, and a genre of document – the petition – that provides access to these issues.

In early modern Venice, credit was ubiquitous, with various lenders offering long- and short- term loans. This article traces the structure of the Venetian credit market in the eighteenth century and examines the borrowing opportunities available to the local population, focusing in particular on consumer credit. The research studies how people approached credit in a pre-industrial society, and what factors may have shaped the ways through which they accessed borrowing. More broadly, how did Venetian households cope with uncertainty? Was the local credit market able to offer borrowers multiple, equally viable options? The article explores the interaction between the supply and demand for credit, emphasising the organised nature of the Venetian market. Ultimately, it argues that even loans that appeared to have unfavourable conditions could, in practice, be quite attractive to borrowers.

Historians have agreed that the gender division of labour in rural households was broadly similar across the whole of northern and western Europe during the early modern period. Until recently, however, there has been a lack of detailed data about the historical division of labour within European countries with which to test the validity of such cross-cultural generalizations. New research that has collected evidence of work tasks for early modern Sweden and England now makes it possible to undertake a direct comparison of two European countries. In this article, the gender division of labour in agriculture, craft production and commerce in Sweden and England is compared to demonstrate the complexity of historical gender divisions of labour. It presents a detailed picture of the gender division of labour that not only shows differences between the two countries but also demonstrates flexibility and adaptability in the allocation of work between women and men. As a consequence, we argue that neither broad generalizations nor single causes are adequate explanations for the patterns observed.