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.

Examining the poetry and practice of courtly love and the mores of aristocratic marriages, Duby shows the Middle Ages to be male-dominated. Women were regarded as symbols, as figures of temptation who paradoxically had no desires of their own. Duby argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and from feudalism - both bastions of masculinity

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.

This volume addresses the current fashion for research on the family and domesticity in the past. It draws together work from various disciplines - historical, art-historical and literary - with their very different source materials and from a broad geographical area, including some countries - such as Croatia and Poland - which are not usually considered in standard text books on the medieval family. This volume considers the various affective relationships within and around the family and the manner in which those relationships were regulated and ritualized in more public arenas. Despite their disparate approaches and geographical spread, these essays share many thematic concerns; the ideologies which structured gender roles, inheritance rights, incest law and the ethics of domestic violence, for example, are all considered here. This collection originates from the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2001 when the special strand was entitled Domus and Familia and attracted huge participation. This book aims to reflect that richness and variety whilst contributing to an expanding area of historical enquiry.