Rescuing the premodern family from the grim picture many
historians have given us of life in early Europe, "Ancestors"
offers a major reassessment of a crucial aspect of European
history--and tells a story of age-old domesticity inextricably
linked, and surprisingly similar, to our own.
An elegant summa on family life in Europe past, this compact and
powerful book extends and completes a project begun with Steven
Ozment's "When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe"
(Harvard). Here Ozment, the leading historian of the family in the
middle centuries, replaces the often miserable depiction of
premodern family relations with a delicately nuanced portrait of a
vibrant and loving social group. Mining the records of families'
private lives--from diaries and letters to fiction and
woodcuts--Ozment shows us a preindustrial family not very different
from the later family of high industry that is generally viewed as
the precursor to the sentimental nuclear family of today.
In "Ancestors," we see the familiar pattern of a domestic wife
and working father in a home in which spousal and parental love
were amply present: parents cherished their children, wives were
helpmeets in providing for the family, and the genders were nearly
equal. Contrary to the abstractions of history, parents then--as
now--were sensitive to the emotional and psychological needs of
their children, treated them with affection, and gave them a secure
early life and caring preparation for adulthood.
As it recasts familial history, "Ancestors" resonates beyond
its time, revealing how much the story of the premodern family has
to say to a modern society that finds itself in the throes of a
family crisis.
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