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Susannah Ottaway, Marjorie Keniston McIntosh. Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 927–928, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.927
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Extract
The history of poverty and poor relief in English history has long been blessed by twin fortunes. Since the time of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, England's finest social historians have provided provocative and sweeping analyses of England's unique poor relief system. At the same time, because the surviving source materials from the poor laws are so rich, local historians and narrowly focused monographs have meticulously recreated the local experiences of the poor. In Marjorie Keniston McIntosh's new book, we have a wonderful marriage of both veins of research. McIntosh is already a leading figure in the analysis of the social and economic world of late medieval and Reformation England through her works Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (1998) and Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (2005), but she has also spent decades exploring sources on poverty in record offices across England. Thus her new book is at once compelling in its analysis and exceptionally fine grained in its account of changes in local treatment of the poor during a crucial era in English social history.
