The Family in Early Modern England (review)

Billed as a fresh overview of the most important recent work on the history of the English family, this book is, in fact, a festschrift for the English historian Anthony Fletcher, complete with photograph and memoir of the honoree. The book also reappraises the work of Lawrence Stone, three decades after the publication of his controversial opus, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977). Though acknowledging its flaws, Berry and Foyster call Stone's book a "landmark," "seminal," and "good to think with," and praise its "dynamic sense of historical change"(1, 3, 8).

The contributors appear to have been charged to comment upon Stone. Their perfunctory remarks about The Family, Sex and Marriage at the outset force them to backpedal uncomfortably later in an attempt to dissociate themselves from Stone's errors, misconceptions, false assumptions, misplaced emphases, condescension, social bias, distorted evidence, and failure of imagination. As Steve Hindle observes, "Stone's views on the family lives of the poor provoked dismay and embarrassment among his critics and apologists alike" (127), Thompson going so far as to say that Stone's book should be pulped.¹ Stone's bleak view of family relationships, his patrician stance, and his fanciful narrative of family typologies have been so completely discredited that there is little to be gained from flogging this dead horse again.

Fortunately, the contributors have fresh ideas to present and new material to report. They draw more from English archives than interdisciplinary social theory. Tim Stretton uses manuscripts from the Court of Requests to demonstrate how humble people could extricate themselves from failed marriages, centuries before the availability of divorce. Between 1540 and 1660 the secular law proved to be remarkably flexible, assisting friends, neighbors, kin, and colleagues in resolving difficulties between husbands and wives. Bernard Capp uses the London Metropolitan Archives to explore sexual and behavioral disorders in the 1650s. He shows how marriage partners and magistrates used the Adultery Act of 1650 on behalf of the reformation of manners, and how some families weathered the moral turbulence of the Interregnum.

Garthine Walker uses criminal court files and the records of Star Chamber to explore female criminality and the limitations of the concept of feme covert. She discovers that crime was sometimes a family business, with varying consequences for wives and husbands, servants, and children. John Walter reminds us that participants in crowds were also members of families, whose roles and rhetoric were strongly gendered. He too exploits Star Chamber records from the reign of James I to illuminate the masculine sociability of collective action, the presence of women and children in agrarian protests, and the uncertainties of the law in imposing punishment. Hindle finds narratives of family distress and records of estrangement and solidarity in petitions for poor relief. A microhistorical analysis of the plight of one northern family reveals the interplay of credit, makeshift, and relief at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Berry and Foyster collaborate on a chapter on childless men. Ranging through medical knowledge and gendered notions of honor, mostly from printed sources, they demonstrate the importance of paternity to early modern notions of masculinity. Ingrid Teague's territory overlaps with Stone's, addressing aristocratic families in the early eighteenth century. The unpublished letters of Lady Isabella Wentworth reveal an elite family in action, with anxieties and accomplishments that defy categorization. Also in the eighteenth century, Joanne Bailey draws on the records of ecclesiastical courts, Doctors' Commons, and King's Bench to explore gendered representations of paternity and maternity in matrimonial litigation. Hers is a rich, detailed and revealing account of violence and politeness, as well as domesticity and its disruption, among the Hanoverian elite.

Each of these essays is rewarding. Most are sophisticated and well written. They demonstrate the vitality and fecundity of the field. Though not a new history of the early modern family, this volume indicates the myriad intersections of family experience with gender, culture...