In 2026, Continuity and Change celebrates its 40th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the editors have curated a selection of articles from the journal’s archive, made free-to-read for a limited time. In this blog post, the editorial team offer a reflective introduction to the anniversary selection, looking back on the journal’s origins and evolution while looking forward to the work still to come.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Continuity and Change: A Journal of Social Structure, Law and Demography in Past Societies. As the editorial team, we are delighted to celebrate this milestone with this virtual anniversary edition that offers to our readers a selection of articles from the journal’s archive.
When the journal was founded in 1986, it set itself an ambitious goal: to create a space for rigorous, interdisciplinary work on the structures shaping human societies across time and place. Its founders understood that many of the most important questions about social change could not be answered from within a single discipline. How families formed, how legal systems developed, how populations expanded or declined, how inequality endured or shifted – these were questions that demanded conversation across disciplines. From its first issue, Continuity and Change sought to encourage that exchange.
The journal moved to Liverpool University Press in 2026 and will continue to publish work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, brings together quantitative and qualitative approaches, and takes comparatives studies as a way of understanding the past.
Over the past forty years, the journal has published research spanning centuries and continents, from medieval Europe to colonial Latin America, from early modern Asia to twentieth-century Africa. Throughout the last four decades, Continuity and Change has evolved alongside the developments in the academic research, welcoming new approaches, new questions and new voices while staying true to its original aims.
To mark this anniversary, we have brought together a selection of articles that reflect the journal’s journey – its past, its present, and its future. Drawn from across the decades, these pieces include usual paid resources that are either some of the most read articles or articles written by scholars that played an important role in Continuity and Change since its beginning and throughout the decades.
Others are some influential works we have published. Most of these articles tackle long-standing historiographical problems, such as household formation, family patterns, and gender and work in past societies. Among the latter, there is a penchant for the dissection of how both men and women contribute to household income and what factors such as age and marital status impact the extent of such contributions – a topic which has received considerable attention over the last two decades. Other works provide food for thought to present and future concerns, like the piece on tenancy and occupation in Palestine.
The Editorial Team
Free‑to‑read articles from the journal’s archive
Wretched girls, wretched boys and the European Marriage Pattern in England (c. 1250–1350)
by Judith M. Bennett, Volume 34, Issue 3 December 2019
Girls and their families in an era of economic change
by Jane Humphries, Volume 35, Issue 3 December 2020
Reconsidering maternal mortality in medieval England: aristocratic Englishwomen, c. 1236–1503
by Rachel Podd, Volume 35, Issue 2 July 2020
The variety of women’s experiences as servants in England (1548–1649): evidence from church court depositions
by Charmian Mansell, Volume 33, Issue 3 December 2018
Mistress or maid: the structure of women’s work in Sweden, 1550–1800
Jonas Lindstrom et al., Volume 32, Issue 2 July 2017
The route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s–1947
by Amos Nadan, Volume 36, Issue 2 August 2021
Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the ‘nuclear-hardship’ hypothesis
by P. Laslett, Volume 3, Issue 2 August 1988
Nordic family patterns and the north-west European household system
by B. Moring, Volume 18, Issue 1 August 2003
Leaving home and the process of household formation in pre-industrial England
by R. Wall, Volume 2, Issue 1 May 1987
Subscribe to access 40 years of archive content
If you would like to read more from Continuity and Change and access the complete 40‑year archive online, please recommend the journal to your librarian to gain access through your institution.
Also of interest: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland
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