Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500-1789 (review)

Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789 is one of three projected volumes (the other two will cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) synthesizing the research on the European family done in the thirty-five years that the history of the family has been a distinct and legitimate field of historical inquiry. Despite its synthetic aims, the book is not a cohesive narrative but instead a series of essays by leading European and American scholars on various aspects of early modern European family life. The essays are of uniformly high quality, covering both the basics and the latest findings in clear and simple language. Therefore they are suitable for undergraduate readings as well as quick fixes for scholars updating their knowledge.

As promised, the essays summarize the latest research in the field. Family history grew out of demography, specifically the family reconstitutions of Louis Henry and the Cambridge Group, and among the most useful of the book’s essays are those summarizing the latest demographic studies, like Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux’s article on marriage patterns, Pier Paolo Viazzo’s work on fertility and mortality, and Ulrich Pfister’s essay on protoindustrialization, which synthesizes the long debate about whether protoindustrialization lowered the age of marriage. These essays show that in the last thirty years demographers have found many local variants but generally the main pattern—Hajnal’s famous “European marriage pattern” of high rates of celibacy, late marriage, small nuclear families, and relatively low fertility and mortality—sketched out by the field’s pioneers is still intact.

But only for Western Europe. One of the major trends in history in recent years is globalization, and Family Life in Early Modern Times reflects this not only in its international roster of contributors and simultaneous publication in the US and Europe but also in its attempt to cover all of Europe, including Russia and the Ottoman Empire. But globalization is even more difficult to achieve in family history than in other fields, because what little research there is on families in Central and Eastern Europe suggests a very different pattern of universal early marriage, large and complex family structures, and high fertility and mortality. Therefore the supposedly general conclusions in most of the essays hold good only for Western Europe, and the dutiful attempts to counteract this by inserting occasional paragraphs on Russia and the Ottoman Empire just make this more obvious. Only Karel Kaser’s essay on the impact of serfdom on household size in Eastern Europe really covers that area. Obviously a major task for historians of the family in the coming years is truly integrating Eastern Europe into the field and analyzing where and why patterns in the East and West converge and diverge.

Another major historical trend of the last three decades reflected in the book is the expansion of social history and its transformation into cultural history. No collection of essays on the history of the family published thirty years ago would have included ones like Rafaella Sarti’s brilliant survey of early modern material culture, Lloyd Bonfield’s remarkably clear exegesis of laws on marriage and inheritance, or David Gaunt’s exploration of the cultural meanings of kinship in the Medieval and early modern periods. While these essays from ancillary fields greatly enrich our understanding of early modern families, they also raise the question which inevitably arises in a review of a collection of essays: Why these and not others? Specifically, why not include from the burgeoning field of gender history an essay on gender roles or one on the cultural meaning of patriarchy? Both topics are central to understanding the dynamics of early modern family life.

Exactly what these dynamics were and how family members related to each other have been much debated over the years, and again Family Life in Early Modern Times reflects this. Family history as a field owes its existence not only to the work...