Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

An assessment of the rural family across a period extending from the early Middle Ages to the late Middle Ages inevitably presents not just a series of challenges but also a range of likely approaches. In order to examine the rural family across three quarters of a millennium, it seems appropriate, if not necessarily sensible, to divide the analysis between a number of facets of the medieval family, namely as domestic unit, as economic unit, and as a cultural unit. By so doing we will be able to move widely over shared agendas within a variety of studies across medieval Europe, engaging with historiographical traditions and grappling with analytical approaches to the family.It is, broadly speaking, in discussion of family structure and demography, of economy and of culture, that the historiographical framing of the medieval family has been constructed. In that respect also, the history of the family has tended to follow the familiar lines of the general development of the discipline. Much of the work on the family in past time, and not just the medieval rural family, has been a product of broader discipline‐wide developments, including the emergence of women's history and gender history, and the close historical engagement with the agendas of the social sciences. Thus, sociological investigation of the family, consistent with the growth of a new social history in the 1960s and 1970s, ... log in or subscribe to read full text