Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe - Hardcover

In this boldly written polemic Steven Ozment takes an enthusiastic cudgel to prevailing negative perceptions of Early Modern family life. Drawing on his unrivalled knowledge of contemporary family archives, Ozment shows that contrary to myth, relations between husband and wife, and between parent and child, were characterized by affection and mutual respect. This text, the product of half a lifetime of research and contemplation, will be an important point of departure for future scholarship on the subject.--Andrew Pettegree, University of St. Andrews Over the past three decades, Steve Ozment has brought to brilliant light and life the intricacies and intimacies of the Western family. This book is a crisp distillation of his most impressive findings, and a stirring declaration of a new historiography of the Western family.--John Witte, Jr., Emory University Ozment...has researched diaries, letters, fiction, and even woodcuts to present a picture of pre-industrial family life in Europe in the Middle Ages. He discusses such themes as working women...and women's place in religion and society. He examines the practice of contraception (condemned by the church and justified by the laity), parent-child relations, infanticide, wet-nursing, and parental advice to children...Ozment's absorbing look at some of our ancestors living in a wholly different society shows us how little things have changed.--George Cohen"Booklist" (02/15/2001) Steven Ozment's handsome short book Ancestors is an unashamed polemic, a robust if not uniformly persuasive defense of the existence of the "loving family in Old Europe," and an assertion of its fundamental continuity with modern family experience...Ozment is...a first-rate religious historian.--Eamon Duffy"New York Review of Books" (12/19/2002) Ozment...has written a concise answer to Ari s and his admirers which can be read in a pleasurable couple of hours by the occupant of a Saturday sofa or a seat on a commuter train. In Ancestors...Ozment sets out to challenge a conception of the premodern family as a stifling patriarchal tyranny inimical to "bonds of deep affection or relationships of true equality..".Everybody interested in the history of the family should certainly read this thought-provoking little book, tract for the times as well as guide to the past.--Ralph Houlbrooke"Times Literary Supplement" (03/15/2002) In the 1960s and 1970s a group of enormously influential historians...argued that pre-industrial families were...rigidly 'patriarchal, ' and children were viewed mainly as assets; hence the deep bonds of love and care between parent and child which we now associate with the 'nuclear family' were essentially nonexistent. In this elegant, persuasive book...Ozment presents a very different picture. He argues that the relationship between spouses was far more cooperative and loving, and the affection of parents for their children was far fiercer, than [Philippe] Aries and his disciples would have it...An example of scholarship confirming common sense (and refuting the highly theoretical work of once trendy historians)...Ancestors amounts to an eloquent--and academically unfashionable--condemnation of those historians who approach an earlier age 'with an eye only to determining where that age stands on some burning present-day issue.'--Benjamin Schwarz"The Atlantic" (04/01/2001) This is vintage Ozment: fluent, insightful, provocative. Ancestors challenges us to take a fresh look at the way we approach the history of the family.--Roderick Phillips, Carleton University A major contribution to a field of historical study that has been particularly active over the last forty years. It provides a magistral overview that is uniformly astute and fair-minded of a great many studies, both general and specific, written in many countries from many points of view, some of them highly controversial. It ends with a compelling explanation of the method underlying Ozment's own substantial contributions to the field.--Robert M. Kingdon, author of Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva

A summary on family life in Europe past, this compact book extends and completes a project begun with Steven Ozment's "When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe". Here Ozment replaces the often miserable depiction of pre-modern 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 pre-industrial 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 this text, we see the familiar pattern of a domestic wife and working father in a home in which spousal and parental love were amply present. 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.