A comprehensive and illuminating history of the development of marriage and the family in the Middle Ages written by the authors of the bestselling Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City.

Historians have only recently awakened to the importance of the family. the basic social unit throughout human history. Long left to the anthro-pologists and sociologists, the family and marriage-its indispensable accessory-have stirred intense controversy since being taken up by early modern historians. Philippe Ariès, Edward Shorter, Peter Laslett, and others postulated a number of challenging hypotheses. Was the family in former times large in size and extended in shape, and has it undergone "progressive nuclearization," or has the dominant type always been the conjugal family (parents and children)? Were the relations within the family in pre-industrial society "cold." and is affectionate and humane child-raising "good-mothering"-a product of industrializa-tion? Were women formerly chattels with few rights in a male-dominated world? Research now permits a synthesis of the findings of modern scholars into a coherent account of the development of marriage and the family through the thousand years of the Middle Ages, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the early modern era.