This opening volume of a three-part history of the family in Europe examines the material conditions of family life, housing, diet and domestic organisation, and the economic and social factors that influenced its development.

Groundbreaking essays on Sephardic Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire and Western Sephardic communities

In 17th-century France, families were essential in the shaping of capitalism and the process of state formation. Exploring civil lawsuits in French cities, 'Family Business' reveals the part that the management of everyday difficulties, in court and out, played in these wider phenomena.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603–1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status—from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant—but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources—population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature—to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.

This text provides an assessment of the most important research published in the past three decades on the English family.

This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history. Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community. A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mothers and Children provides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.