Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (review)

Social history, particularly in its demographic variant, has become unfashionable, but Lynch's impressive, interpretive synthesis of research on urban history and on demographic history demonstrates the central importance of these fields for understanding the issues posed by major social theorists of European society. Her work stakes out a large territory both in time and space—England east to the German states and south through Spain and Italy from 1200 until the decades of industrialization and demographic transition after 1800. Weber's analysis of western cities, along with the work of Laslett, Hajnal, and Swaan set the theoretical framework for the study.¹

Lynch identifies the key demographic structures—migration, high mortality, relatively late marriage, small households—that shaped popular life in European towns, adding an analysis of religious ideals and social forms, which, she argues, encouraged individuals to seek "bonds of association" that extended beyond kin networks (68). In settings shaped by Christian values and institutions, where plebians lived in nuclear families, communities such as confraternities and beguinages substituted for missing kin and also assumed welfare functions. In these settings, family was a flexible concept that covered public as well as private relationships. Demography encouraged the growth of civil society, which provided entitlements to members of carefully defined communities. Lynch's benign picture of urban social relations is tempered by acknowledgment of those who were excluded from communal assistance, but her study rejects the disciplinary arguments of Foucault in favor of a liberal view of welfare institutions and civic relationships.²

Lynch also points out how issues of gender shaped community building. Because urban populations had disproportionate numbers offemales who played important roles in many trades, both skilled and unskilled, city elites had to come to terms with unattached women, competitive women, and poor women. She stresses the high degree of autonomy granted to urban females who, even if excluded from some craft guilds, joined voluntary organizations and, as beguines and beatas, ran communities for themselves outside kin-based households. Her work identifies medieval and early modern variants of maternalist activities through the medium of "a religiously-inspired 'public motherhood'" (214). Sexual politics have to be merged into familiar stories of urban rivalries based on family, trade, and religion.

As "imagined communities" shifted from city to nation, so did the responsibility for defining and organizing entitlements to welfare. This change is most easily traced in France during the period of the Revolution when the National Assembly began to legislate the outlines of poor relief. The English case offers less clear-cut support for her evolutionary story of a shift from city to center around 1800. Although parishes had the responsibility for their own poor, the central Parliament in 1601 set the outlines of their responsibility and regularly amended it after discussion at the national level.

Lynch relies on the concept of "western society," although she quite rightly distances herself from the claim of its uniqueness. Her focus upon variables that shaped west European families and communities works effectively to identify long-term continuities, but the book's title and internal terminology make broader claims than she substantiates. West and south Europe is not what is typically meant by "western society." The book accomplishes so much that it does not need to try to occupy that wide a territory.