This book inaugurates a major three-volume history of the family in Europe over the past five hundred years. In the series, eminent European and American social historians present a fresh reading of family life in Europe, explaining how families and family relations differed across Europe and how and why they changed over time.

This volume deals with family life in Europe -- and the institutional, economic, political, and cultural forces that transformed it -- from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Chapters consider, for example, the family's housing, diet, and domestic organization; the nature of family law; the impact of religious change; demographic factors such as disease and childhood mortality; relations between parents and children; and the effect of changing trends in marriage, divorce, and extended kin relationships. Using research techniques from the social sciences as well as new insights from cultural and gender history and the history of sexuality, the contributors present a vivid picture of family life in early modern times that will forever change our image of that era.