Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (review)

In this thoughtful, wide-ranging survey of the premodern family, Ozment challenges the historiographical underpinnings of present-day family studies. Beginning with the work of Philippe Ariès, notably his Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family (New York, 1962), Ozment characterizes Ariès contribution to family studies as a recognition of "a new sensibility in family life that led in the early modern period to the triumph of privacy over sensibility and of paternal control over insouciance."

Proceeding from "the house that Ariès built," Ozment surveys the work of two German critics, Michel Mitterauer and Richard Sieders, whose book appeared in English as The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership (Chicago, 1981), tracing the growth of the "Sentimental Family" to the eve of the modern period, when urbanism and the industrial revolution allowed for the rise of an egalitarian family structure. In his work, Families in Former Times (Cambridge, 1979), Jean-Louis Flandrin added to the historiographical discussion by probing the Roman Catholic teaching manuals and confessional literature as a means of understanding spousal interaction in the early modern period.

Ozment's principal historiographical icon is Lawerence Stone, whose The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977) divided the evolution of the family into three epochs. The first, "The Open Lineage Family (1450-1630)," manifested greater concern with the extended rather than the compact family; the second, "Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family, 1500-1700," was marked by a higher degree of intimacy, inward-looking affection than its predecessor; finally, "The Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family, 1640-1800," emphasized paternal rights and the responsibilities of both genders. With a pinch of irony, Ozment finds Stone's precisely honed divisions dressed by "a happy argument" and an "even happier prose" (20).

Ozment moves with ease from historiographical explorations to an evenhanded, compact narrative line. Among several excellent narrative chapters, the fourth, "The Omnipresent Child," is the most challenging. Ozment finds a growing concern among parents of the middle class during the early modern period that they might lose their children in premature birth, or in childbirth, accident, or disease. If, barring peradventure, a child survived, the parents sought to prepare him/her for a life independent of them. By the age of twelve or thirteen to the early twenties, children entered upon years of apprenticeship, as an artisan, a merchant, a church cleric, or a professional. These years became a continuation of training begun in the household.

In his concluding chapter, Ozment reviews "pragmatic epistolography," which includes the study of such family archives, inter alia, as diaries, journals, autobiographies, and private correspondence. In their very singularity, these first-person narratives provide a source that is often marked by clarity and truthfulness. Recent microhistorical studies have opened up new avenues of research, and contrary to the historians of the 1960s and 1970s (including Stone), the "modern sentimental family exists as far back in time and as widely in space as there are proper sources to document it" (109).