Historians have only recently awakened to the importance of the family, the basic social unit throughout human history. This book traces the development of marriage and the family from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. It describes how the Roman and barbarian cultural streams merged under the influence of the Christian church to forge new concepts, customs, laws, and practices. Century by century it follows the development -- sometimes gradual, at other times revolutionary -- of significant elements in the history of the family Book jacket.
The collection reveals how scholars of the 1970s through the 1990s argued the importance of previously unconsidered questions about the shape of medieval familial experience, and how their mutual information and criticism has refined and added to this investigation in the intervening period.
A collection of essays by Michael Sheehan, whose work and interpretation on medieval property, marriage, family, sexuality, and law has insprired scholars for 40 years.
"A great virtue of this reader is the length of its selections--not just snippets, but long enough portions for students to get a real sense of how the text works." - Ruth Mazo Karras, University of Minnesota
This 2007 book analyzes how, why, and when pre-modern Europeans documented their marriages - through property deeds, marital settlements, dotal charters, church court depositions, wedding liturgies, and other indicia of marital consent. The authors consider both the function of documentation in the process of marrying and what the surviving documents say about pre-modern marriage and how people in the day understood it. Drawing on archival evidence from classical Rome, medieval France, England, Iceland, and Ireland, and Renaissance Florence, Douai, and Geneva, the volume provides a rich interdisciplinary analysis of the range of marital customs, laws, and practices in Western Christendom. The chapters include freshly translated specimen documents that bring the reader closer to the actual practice of marrying than the normative literature of pre-modern theology and canon law.
Mitchell takes a regional approach in exploring the lives of families in the Middle Ages. Starting with the late Roman families the first five chapters explore the roles of family members defined by tradition and law, what constituted a legal marriage and a family, to whom the children belonged, and who was included in the extended family. The remaining chapters delve into daily family life - homes of various social classes and the division of labor, both maintaining the home and family-based labor such as agriculture, banking, manufacturing of goods, and mercantile activity. Religious cultures of the medieval world varied but all often included oblation of children to monasteries, religious ceremonies for life stages, and family obligations in the religious culture. Birth, death and inheritance all affected the family and new families were often formed from previous generations and defunct family lines. Non-traditional families included family structures advocated by heretical groups - the Cathars and the Beguines, families created without marriage - concubinage relationships, and those that developed as a result of social and environmental stresses - the Black Death, war, and natural disasters. Perfect for students studying the Middle Ages and medieval life, this work provides a clear and engaging narrative on the day-to-day lives of the family. Reference resources include a timeline, sources for further reading, photographs and an index. Volumes in the Family Life Through History series focus on the day-to-day lives and roles of families. The roles of all family members are defined and information on daily family life, the role of the family in society, and the ever-changing definition of the term family' are discussed. Discussion of the nuclear family, single parent homes, foster and adoptive families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families are included where appropriate. Topics such as meal planning, homes, entertainment and celebrations, are discussed along with larger social issues that originate in the home like domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and divorce. Ideal for students and general readers alike, books in this series bring the history of everyday people to life.
This colelction of twelve original essays by European and American scholars, offers some of the latest research in three broad areas of medieval history: marriage, children, and family ties.
A host of scholars in sociology, communications, human development, economics, history, and psychology join Sussman (Union Institute, Cincinnati, OH), Steinmetz (Indiana U.) and Peterson (Arizona State U.) to complete this volume on marriage and the family. Articles reflect a broad range of interests, discussing such topics as demography, ethnic variation in the family, divorce, adolescence in contemporary families, work, religion, law, communication, abuse and violence, and sexuality. The book also includes a variety of articles on theories and methods of family research and marital and family therapy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.
