Introduction

Introduction

Few subjects in history are so widely thought to be popularly understood, and are in fact so difficult to describe and analyse, as 'families' and 'households'. The instant we attempt to unpack the meanings and practice of these everyday terms, we find a complex and burgeoning array (often culturally determined) of assumptions, definitions, and practices. The problems start with the terms themselves; as is now widely recognized, even the word 'family' derives not from any understanding of kin-group or intimate blood connections but instead from the medieval familia, or extended household, an institution which comprised not only blood-relatives, but the servants and retainers of the household head, and which acted not just as a private organization, but also as a quasi-public authority structure.¹ The Cambridge Population Research Group, investigating demographics and household formation in early modern England, were forced to create a new term, 'houseful', to describe situations where co-residency under one roof—or a set of roofs—did not imply any of the other connections (blood-relations, shared economies or common family aims) we more usually associate with 'household'.² Unsurprisingly, many criteria can be proposed for what constitutes a 'family' and/or a 'household' in past time. In 1974, Hammel and Laslett carefully proposed that the

domestic group…consists and consisted of those who share the same physical space for the purposes of eating, sleeping and taking rest and leisure, growing up, child rearing and procreating.³

They also noted that when the record-keepers of medieval and early modern Europe set down blocks of names together as if to signify a family or household

membership in these blocks was determined by three main considerations. Persons would only appear together within a block if they shared a certain space (a locational criterion), if they shared a number of activities (a functional criterion), and if they were related to one another by blood or marriage (a kinship criterion).⁴

But each of these criteria could be flexible. In the European past, for instance, shared domestic spaces could vary from the single-room tenements, or storeys of single rooms (discussed by Vanessa Harding in her article here) and inhabited by married couples, widows/widowers, singletons, and lodgers in a variety of social conformations, to sprawling district conglomerates housing extended patrilineages of rich renaissance Italians.⁵ The functional activities shared by 'households' could be multitudinous and diverse; artisanal production, conspicuous consumption, the socializing of children and dependents, the care of the elderly, or even (as MacKinney argues of the household described in John Baret's will of 1467, in this issue) the creation of devotional space and timetables.

In view of this astonishing diversity of past households and families, it is perhaps odd that much research has concentrated heavily either on the pre-modern nuclear family (especially in England, and particularly in relation to the conjugal bond), or on the patrilineage (especially in renaissance Florence).⁶ In part this narrowing of the field may represent a second orthodoxy, deriving from Hajnal's demographic theories. Hajnal posited that marriage patterns between north-western and southern and eastern Europe differed markedly. The former was characterized by a comparatively high average age of marriage for both men and women (leading, perhaps, to more companionate marriage), comparatively high numbers of single people in the population, neo-local marriages, and, in consequence, a predominance of small, nuclear-family households. In southern and eastern Europe Hajnal saw a contrasting pattern; a lower average age of marriage for women, a greater age-gap between marriage partners, and a greater tendency for newly-married couples to live in a paternal, or patrilineal, household. Furthermore, all these tendencies were held to be, broadly, unchanging from at least the end of the middle ages to the industrial period.⁷ Hajnal's conclusions (widely accepted) hence stressed first the importance of marital age (especially of women) in producing both demographic regimes and household formation, and secondly...