By taking on a long-term perspective, a large geographical scope and moving beyond the homogeneous treatment of single people, this book fleshes out the particularities of urban singles and allows for a better understanding of the attitudes and values underlying this lifestyle in the European past.

Julie De Groot is Member of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO). She is working on a doctoral project on the meaning, use and decoration of domestic spaces in cities of the Southern Low Countries and France during the long sixteenth century.

Isabelle Devos is Associate Professor at the History Department of Ghent University, Belgium, and specializes in social and economic history. She is a historian and demographer.

Ariadne Schmidt is Assistant Professor at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her research interests include the early modern history of work, labour markets, gender and crime. She is a social and economic historian.

Contents
1. Working Alone? Single Women in the Urban Economy of Late Medieval Flanders (Thirteenth-Early Fifteenth Centuries); Peter Stabel
2. Creating a Space for Themselves on the Urban Market. Survival Strategies and Economic Opportunities for Single Women in French Provincial Towns (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries); Anne Montenach
3. Maids, Noblewomen, Journeymen, State Officials, and Others. Unmarried Adults in Four Swedish Towns, 17501855; Dag Lindström
4. Destitute in December. Unmarried Scots Navigating Poverty in Paisley, 1861; Wendy M. Gordon
5. Desperately Seeking the Single Man in Later Medieval England; P.J.P. Goldberg
6. To Be or not to Be a Beguine in an Early Modern Town: Piety or Pragmatism? The Great Beguinage of St. Catherine in Sixteenth-Century Mechelen; Kim Overlaet
7. 'Why did she not live with her husband and how was she able to support herself?' Grass Widow Prostitutes in Eighteenth-Century Bruges; Maja Mechant
8. Single Life in Fifteenth-Century Bruges. Living Arrangements and Material Culture at the Fringes of Urban Society; Inneke Baatsen, Julie De Groot and Isis Sturtewagen
9. Single People and the Material Culture of the English Urban Home in the Long Eighteenth Century; David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby
10. Rich, Male and Single. The Consumption Practices of Edward Leigh, 1742-1786; Jon Stobart