Here is a lively study of marriage and the family during the
Reformation, primarily in Gemany and Switzerland, that dispels the
commonly held notion of fathers as tyrannical and families as
loveless.
Did husbands and wives love one another in Reformation Europe?
Did the home and family life matter to most people? In this
wide-ranging work, Steven Ozment has gathered the answers of
contemporaries to these questions. His subject is the patriarchal
family in Germany and Switzerland, primarily among Protestants. But
unlike modern scholars from Philippe Arics to Lawrence Stone,
Ozment finds the fathers of early modern Europe sympathetic and
even admirable. They were not domineering or loveless men, nor were
their homes the training ground for passive citizenry in an age of
political absolutism. From prenatal care to graveside grief, they
expressed deep love for their wives and children. Rather than a
place where women and children were bullied by male chauvinists,
the Protestant home was the center of a domestic reform movement
against Renaissance antifeminism and was an attempt to resolve the
crises of family life. Demanding proper marriages for all women,
Martin Luther and his followers suppressed convents and cloisters
as the chief institutions of womankind's sexual repression,
cultural deprivation, and male clerical domination. Consent,
companionship, and mutual respect became the watchwords of
marriage. And because they did, genuine divorce and remarriage
became possible among Christians for the first time.
This graceful book restores humanity to the Reformation family
and to family history.
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