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its most cataclysmic changes: Alec Ryrie writes that the implementation and impact of the dissolution of the monasteries ‘remains weirdly under-researched’ (109), while Andy Wood notes that ‘[t]he social history of the English Revolution remains to be written’ (390). Other essays suggest new directions: for Alison Games, English reactions to ‘strangers’ in rural areas requires further research (353), and Phil Withington calls for greater attention to the urban dimensions of state formation (187). New social histories of early modern England might usefully incorporate more serious and sustained comparative approaches: Wood is right to say that the future of English social history will require the transcendence of ‘subdisciplinary boundaries’, but it will also benefit from querying and breaking down national boundaries and seeing England’s histories as taking place in European (not to mention global) contexts. Wood offers a ‘coda’ on ‘History, Time and Social Memory’ which addresses ‘the popular sense of historical change in this period’, and posits the existence of ‘a distinctly early modern sense of the past’ (375–76), in which an awareness of profound recent change merged with the formation of new and sometimes traumatic popular memories. The persistence of narratives of England’s early modern history in the present is, as Wrightson argues in the introduction, part of what makes the term ‘early modern’ an appropriate one for describing this period in England’s history: ‘It describes a deep past that is not quite past’ (9).