::: readings

Ruth R. Wisse. Jews and Power. Schocken Books (2007).

Wisse, in Jews and Power, gives a brief overview of the history of the Jews, highlighting their relationship with the power structures of the countries in which they have lived since the beginnings of the Diaspora in the 1st Century. Hers is mostly a history of the ways in which Jews maintained their own identity while struggling to perserve themselves without the sustaining and protective influence of a nation-state. She discusses the emergence of Yiddish and the importance of language, including the revival of Hebrew. She also discusses the difficulties of the Arab-Jewish relationship, stating explicitly that: “Common opposition to Usrael remains to the present day the strongest univying political element among Arab and muslim countries that otherwise compete with one another” (138).

• http://www.storyofstuff.com/

see also:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Stuff
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lebow
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Leonard

In this 20 minute video, Leonard gives a brief overview of her inquiries into the question: “Where does stuff come from?” She explored the linear progression extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal, highlighting the problematic nature of this model in a finite system known as our earth.

Her overall argument is that we are using too much stuff, and points to the problems of a system that holds as its highest ideal consumerism. The fact that “in this system, if you own or buy lots of stuff, you don’t have a lot of value,”  is exactly what has caused so many problems for us today. This is not always how it has been, however, as she is clear to point out.

Going back to the 1950’s and the war-machine in a post-world-war era, Leonard singles out the distinct shift in design as the primary immediate culprit for the current status quo. She quotes prominent economist Victor Lebow’s comments concering American consumer culture, which state:

“Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

The development of a planned obsolescene coupled with a perceived obsolescence can, however, be overcome she argues, if and only if we choose to work towards that end, devising a new system which relies on green chemistry, a circular instead of linear path, and an awareness and restraint of our consumption.

My Thoughts:

I agree, the system we have inherited is inherintly faulted and needs some serious revisions in its basic concepts. Wanton consumption with no regard to the “life-cycle” of the materials involved, or, much more importantly, if it disregards the lives the humans along the way and insists that what it offers is better than what was, will be the cause for future calamities and tragedies yet unimagined.

I similarly agree that the role of television is paramount and has created a society in which consumerism is the ideal and in which only 1% of products bought are still in use 6 months after the date of purchase. This cannot be sustained.

My Questions:

How do we use the system against itself? Or, in other words, how do we take all of the negative energy that is going against us and turn it in or favor? Is this possible? If not, why not? And if not, than can we even hope to succeede in overcoming it?

Read more »

Olrando Patteson. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Slavery and Social Death attempts to tackle the larger questions of slavery over a longer period of history in a wider geographical area in a more interdisciplinary way than perhaps is even possible within the constraints of five hundred pages. Nevertheless, Orlando Patterson’s work is an important study in its ambitions and its questions, encouraging the dynamic tensions and oscillations that create meaningful discussion and debate on issues of true importance. Despite his weaknesses, from a historians perspective, in his approach as well as his scope, he contributes to the discussion through his astute perceptions regarding the interdependence of master-slave, his discussion on the display of power as well as the perhaps unsuspected results of varying levels of manumission, the idea of property, the effects of natal alienation, and the inherent instability of slavery.

In any fruitful discussion there needs to exist a certain dynamic tension coupled with oscillating vibrations. In other words, much in the same way that a guitar strings need to be taught but not too tight, so too must a discussion be balanced between its two extremes. Many of the complaints that could be made against Patterson stem in part from his differences in approach, which are indicative of his background as a sociologist and not as an historian. The debate over slavery, however, is most fruitful when there is this dynamic tension between the question of specificity, or a detail orientation, and a more general inquiry into larger questions of ethics and philosophy. If the discussion is only about the minutest of details in a specific time, and place, and person, than larger questions of modern-day applications and personal revelations are less likely to be made. If, however, the issue of slavery is only discussed philosophically, then gross errors are bound to be created and perpetuated in an all-too human attempt to find a certain degree of continuity and clearly definable terms in the past. To continue the analogy, just as music is made by not simply stringing a guitar but by causing the strings to vibrate, so too is the discussion made productive not simply by the presence of the two counter-points but by the reader’s active engagement with both sides, and the oscillation between the two. Thus, a careful reading of Slavery and Social Death will produce valuable insights into the larger question of slavery in recent history if coupled with a simultaneous inquiry into more specific historical case studies, thus allowing both works to interact with each other and thereby produce a meaningful dialog on the unfortunate topic of “human parasitism.”

Orlando Patterson’s argument finds its greatest weakness in what is simultaneously one of its greatest strengths, that is: in its interdisciplinary approach. The failings of this are to be found in the simple fact that this work is neither a complete work of historical scholarship, nor is it simply a sociological treatise. It is an attempt to be both, which undermines its ability to be totally one or the other. A historian would therefore find his references to modern philosophers, contemporary comparisons to slavery, and his desire to make broad, overarching statements as weaknesses to his argument (unless he was, of course, attempting to say something about the philosopher, about the contemporary situation, or about historical perceptions of the world by those in it). While his claims are supported by acceptable data, his philosophy and approach step outside of the historian’s realm and into that of sociology. This is, however, somewhat necessitated by the very nature and scope of his work in its attempt to address slavery not just in one place at one time, but over large geo-political spheres in drastically different time periods. Despite these limitations, or perhaps precisely because of them, Patterson is able to make some important contributions.

Patterson’s discussion of the interdependency of masters and slaves, as well as his exploration of the effects of varying levels of manumission and the display of power, as well as his highlighting the essential role of natal alienation all add to the historical discussion of slavery and its far-reaching affects. Importantly, it required someone well outside the realm of historian to make the clear connection between domination and dependence. Quoting Georg Hegel, Patterson writes “total personal power taken to its extreme contradicts itself by its very existence, for total domination can become a form of extreme dependence on the object of one’s power, and total powerlessness can become the secret path to control of the subject that attempts to exercise such power” (2),  and later concludes, “The slaveholder camouflaged his dependence, his parasitism, by various ideological strategies. Paradoxically, he defined the slave as dependent. This is consistent with the distinctively human technique of camouflaging a relationship by defining it as the opposite of what it really is” (337). Another important contribution includes the reversion of what one might normally conclude regarding the actual effects of something like manumission. Patterson writes, “While we normally think of manumission as being the result of the negation of slavery, it is also true that manumission, by providing one of the major incentives for slaves, reinforced the maters-slave relationship… [There is] a direct two-way link between enslavement and manumission” (341).  Similar discussions exist on topics of property and the display of power.

In conclusion, Patterson ambitiously attempts to bridge the conversation of slavery between the world of the historians and the world of the sociologist, and in the attempt contributes to the potential for a meaningful dialog, forcing us to ask the greater questions such as “How, we may ask, could persons be made to accept such natural injustice [as slavery]?” (8)  It must be kept in mind that his work is not strictly historical nor does it approach primary sources solely from a historian’s perspective. Slavery and Social Death does, however, contribute to the larger discussion insomuch as we bring it into dialog with other works and other approaches. In other words, if one focuses too much on details and specifics, they can easily lose sight of the relevance of historical questions on the lives we live in the here and now, which neither the historian nor the sociologist would advocate.

Marzio Barbagli and David Kertzer, “Introduction” in Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500-1789 (2001), ix-xxxii. (168-180)

In this three volume work, Marzio Babagli and David Kertzer solicit the expertise of a number of specialists in their attempt to bring together a synthesis of leading scholarship. In their introduction they write:

“Over the past 35 years hundreds of scholars from many countries, in many languages, and from a variety of disciplines–historians, demographers, anthropologists, sociologists–have published studies focusing on family life in the past. In doing so they have made use of new sources of information, new approaches, and new interpretations. These works have tremendously enriched our knowledge of Western family history, demolishing many commonly accepted stereotypes of what family life was like in the past, and undermining many commonly accepted theories of social change.

“By their vary nature, as pioneering empirical studies these works have typically focused on a very limited geographical areas–few parishes, a town, or somethings a small region–and their results have primarily been published in journals and books not easily accessible to non-experts. What has been lacking to date is a work of synthesis by the leading scholars int eh field that makes the results of this new research available to a broad public, while focusing on both a long sweep of history and on Europe as a whole.” (ix)

Topics that are covered in the introduction briefly include the myth that everyone in pre-industrial Europe married, and did so at a young age; a discussion on population growth at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century; the importance of the Protestant Reformation (beginning in October of 1517); and the differences between various areas of Europe (mostly drawn along the line between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is almost identical to what is known as the Hajnal line).

The final paragraph of the introduction reads:

“We have here given only a brief overview of the nature of family life in early modern times, trying to provide a sense of how it differed from family life today and attempting along the way to dispel some common, but erroneous stereotypes. We have also emphasized the need to distinguish among different regions of Europe, and to identify those aspects of the family that changed over the three centuries from 1500 to 1800. The chapters that follow, examining a series of aspects of family life in the comparative perspective, offer a rich view of European family life in the past.” (xxxii)

My Thoughts:

There is not much for me to say, seeing how this is merely the introduction of a collection of essays, and not the essays themselves. The historiographical content is, however, of importance and serves to reinforce the things already discussed and learned, namely, that family life underwent important changes which were the results of various pressures and occurred differently at different places in Europe, largely along line of Protestantism and Catholicism following the beginnings of the Reformation in early years of the 1500’s.

Rob Lutton, “Godparenthood, Kinship and Piety in Tenterden, England, 1449-1537″ in Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones, Love, Marriage and Family Ties in the Middle Ages (2003), 217-34. (145-154).

In this piece, Rob Lutton asks the questions: “What was godparenthood for, how and why was it used, and what was its relationship to family and kinship? Were the relationships created through baptism and other Christian rites considered as part and parcel of relationships within and beyond the nuclear family, which were bounded by blood and marriage, or were they thought of as something quite different. What bearing did godparenthood have upon the transmission of material, social, and cultural resources between individuals, households, and the generations?” (217)

While admitting that it “was essentially a religious and moral institution which was viewed, whatever its social application, in spiritual and pious terms,” Lutton puts forth the argument that “Godparenthood’s social efficacy lay in its ability to create a ”polyadic horizontal coalition’, a kinship-group, partly natural and partly artificial’, made up of ties between parents and godparents and between godchildren and their ritual kin and sponsors” (218) He goes on to later highlight the symbolic parallelism of the corporal verses spiritual roles as defined under godparenthood between the parents and the godparents, citing that in some Mediterranean societies it was believed that “godparents imparted moral character, complementary to the physical character imparted by parents,” with the ultimate effect being that ideally “godparenthood serves to mitigate the tensions and conflicts involved in the process of household dissolution and formation” (219).

After citing a number of statistics with corresponding graphs of details gleamed from the analysis of wills in the city of Tenterden, England, Lutton writes: “Some have concluded that godparents were not chosen from among the child’s kin in late medieval England. However, the evidence from Tenterden and at least one other centre indicates that there was a significant correlation between natural and spiritual kinship” (225).

One of the more interesting finding proposed by Lutton’s work is the role godparents played in helping children become independent from their parents as they sought to establish their own households. He writes:

“Cases such as this suggest that one of the primary concerns for godparents who left their spiritual kin gifts in their wills was to assist them in marriage and to help them become established economically and domestically in independence from their conjugal families and households. Although this purpose was not usually articulated it is reasonable to assume that this formed the major element of the rationale behind gifts, which are best interpreted in terms of the ideological basis of godparenthood as defined by Pitt-Rivers, that is, to assist in the fulfillment of the individual child’s personal destiny, especially in the establishment of his or her own nuclear family. this transition meant the dissolution of the conjugal family and, therefore, in supporting the child, godparents took the part of anti- or co-parents.” (226-7)

In further support of his claim that godparents served important roles in serving as anti- or co-parents, Lutton cites the crucial need for a larger network of support at crucial times in the life of a family, such as births, marriages, and deaths.

“The importance of godparenthood would have varied over time and may have been greatest at key moments in the complex family histories which could be created by death and remarriage. In times of crisis, which came often when mortality rates were high, kin ties could be strengthened, in the words of Miranda Chaytor, ‘to a point where the distinction between the conjugal unit and the wider kinship system was virtually eroded.’ Active kinship bonds between families joined by marriage, whilst providing a degree of stability and continuity to family relations through crises of mortality and economic hardship, may also have worked to bring a greater degree of coherence and continuity to a household piety. It was a common experience to lose a parent in childhood or adolescence, and at such times relatives had a greater influence over the nuclear family. Collaterals would have been especially significant during these crises, and godparenthood may have further strengthened their influence over young relatives” (222-3).

Lutton concludes:

“Godparenthood as represented in Tenterden and Wealden wills appears to have been invested with a dual nature in the sense conceived of by Gudeman, in that it was distinct from other types of relationship, due to its essentially spiritual and moral nature, but could vary in intensity and social application in terms of whether it overlay existing kinship bonds or the extent to which it could be used to strengthen alliances created through marriage, for example…

Finally, godparents played an important, although as yet little investigated, role in the spiritual, moral, and social education of the young. Spiritual kinship may well have strengthened multi-generation continuities in piety and helped to forge and maintain social and ethnic identities, particularly through the influence of collaterals. Any discussion of the mechanisms and dynamics of cultural transmission in this period should consider godparenthood as a particular and essential aspect of relations of family and kinship” (234).

My Thoughts:

Understanding the importance of having a ‘polyadic horizontal coalition,’ that is, a kinship-group, to support and aid one in times of transitions is essential to any complete understanding of society in the medieval time period. Today, there are any number of ways that individuals make these transitions that have replaced the roles that godparenting played, but we cannot let this modern development hinder our ability to understand and appreciate what was. Lutton argument is convincing and fits with what else we have studied.

My Questions:

What I would like to know at this point is how godparenthood differed across the Hajnal line, and what effects a later age of marriage had on the relationships between godparent and their godchild.

Mary Hartman, “How Northwestern Europe was Strange: Marriage, Households, and History” in Household and the Making of History (2004), 1-33.

In the first chapter of her larger work, Hartman begins with a discussion of the development of the discussion on the topic of social change in Europe from the medieval time-period to present. She finds that there have been many “mistaken notions” (2) and a desire to “divide [the world] into distinct societies” in which “social change in a coherent general phenomenon” and “large-scale change takes all societies through a more-or-less standard set of stages; and that times of rapid change necessarily entail a range of disorderly behaviors such as crime, suicide, and rebellion” (3). In this work, however, she intends to argue “that each master=process was itself dependent upon a prior and distinctive development within western Europe — or, more precisely, within northwestern Europe” (3).

Much of the problem with the recent work of scholars on the topics of social change in Europe over the past thousand years, Hartman argues, is that despite an expansion of history to include new areas, such as social history, women’s history (with their well-founded assumptions and arguments that “the activities of more ordinary men as well as women must always figure into accounts of what makes history run”), these scholars have rarely truly “contested the ingrained view that all the historical action that truly matters takes place in arenas beyond the household” (4). She continue:

“The downside of this extraordinary proliferation of research fields, however, is that collective historical attention has been diverted before a number of critical issues in social history and connected fields — especially demographic, family, and women’s history — were adequately addressed. What is more, risk-taking seems to have been invested more in claiming legitimacy for new specialties than in showing just how each expands historical understanding, resolves ongoing controversies, or upsets the existing consensus on various topics.” (5)

Of particular importance to the arguments developed by Hartman is the work of John Hajnal in his monumental work, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation Systems” (published by the Population and Development Review in 1982) which draws a very important line across Europe, dividing practices regarding marriage and family, or, more specifically, that in certain countries (predominantly those in northwestern Europe, “most women as well as men from the medieval era on married comparatively late and were much closer in age than their counterparts in early-marriage societies” and “a significant number, 10 to 20 percent–and more women than men–never married at all” (6). The ramifications of this, and the subsequent changes it brought, is the topic of Hartman’s work.

Mary Hartman cites Peter Laslett’s work “Characteristics of the Western Family Considered Over Time” (published in the Journal of Family History in 1977), pointing to four specific affects that a later marriage caused, which are:

“First, the family group was confined to one set of parents and their offspring. Second, the age of the mother during childbearing was late, ‘both in experience of the mother and also in the period of fecundity.’ Third, the years separating spouses were few, with many wives older than their husbands and marriages ‘tending towards the companionate.’ Fourth and last, many households contained unrelated servants, making a ‘peculiarity in the individual life cycle of those who went out to service as well as a characteristic of the domestic group.’” (19)

She later adds to this list something that should not be underestimated, which was that because individuals were leaving their own households and entering society unwed, “moving from house to house, often on annual contracts, [these individuals] could readily make the acquaintance of potential marriage partners — and tat they could do so in the absence of parental supervision. This ‘life-cycle’ domestic service was an experience without parallel in societies where early marriage is the rule” (20).

Hartman notes “There is, of course, nothing remarkable, these days anyway, about young persons being close in age at marriage, or taking charge of selecting their spouses, or saving to support themselves in households of their own” (29), but it is precisely the fact that this development began in northwestern Europe at a time much earlier than elsewhere that is of interest, because it is the beginnings of our modern system.

Hartman concludes her chapter, saying:

“Attentiveness to how late-marriage societies worked will be argued to provide new clues to some old mysteries, including the very large one about the source of a widespread insistence upon gender differentiation, as well as upon a hierarchy favoring men. What I shall present as a fairly swift undercutting of a material and ideological buttresses for such beliefs and related pracitices, owing to late-marriage arrangements, raises serious questions about theories that contiue to invoke universal and inexorable mechanisms, whether biological or psychological, to account for what is labeled “male dominance.” Observable elemets of family structure will be argued instead to fo a very long way toward explaining the pervasiveness and longevity of patterns of gender differentiation and hierarch.

These elements, as noted at the outset, will aslo make it easier to explain otherwise baffling evidence that in a rather brief period of time, the ways people spent their daily lives in northwestern European-based societies came to have less to do than ever before with whether they were biologically male of female. An advantage of taking comparative household and family-formation systems into account in addressing the conundrum of a still pervasive insistence upon differences between the sexes is tat unlike most other explanations, this one will be shown to be amenable to empirical scrutiny and applicable, with predictive as well as analytical force, to gender arrangements anywhere.

…

The late-marriage system of family formation will be presented as the vehicle most reponsible for generating novel political structures, tranformed means of livelihood, and fresh socila, cultural, and intellectual systems in the period known as the “early modern era,: from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Along the way, I will also show how the system’s very instability exposed for the first time the common ingredients whose presence has ensured, in nearly all societies, the familiar impulse to differentiate roles, qualities, and status by sex…” (32-33).

My Thoughts:

Mary Hartman has, in my opinion, identified one of the crucially important dividing factors of the modern family with what came before. Recognizing the tremendous role of marrying later plays in the life of the individual, of the family, and ultimately of society, this shift cannot be underestimated and needs more exploration as Hartman proposes. She claims that this interpretation will withstand empirical analysis as well, which, while I believe her, I have not tested, nor have I looked deeply into any of her sources.

My Questions:

If a later marriage is responsible for the significant changes that occur in gender roles, what is responsible for the change to a later age of marriage?

I found this depiction of the Christian-Muslim conflict over the Holy Lands to be very facinating, especially in that no where did it mention or discuss Jews. This seems to have been a result of the methood of presentation, that is, in telling history through the stories of two individuals (King Richard and Saladin) and their opposition to one another. As a result of no comparable single figure among the Jews and their nationless status (i.e. they had not monarch, no military leader, no military at all, and no cities to defend or attack) there was apparently no place for a discussion of their role in this film.

They most certainly were both in Muslim countries and Christian ones as well, and there is no reason not to discuss them during this period, only the filmmakers of this specific piece were not interested for (probably) reasons of time contraints and the lack of a single major figure through whom the story could be told.

Charles Reid, “The Right of Paternal Power” in Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (2004), 69-97. (108-122)

Reid discusses the changing role of paternal power in the family from Roman through medieval Europe, specifically highlighting the shift from absolute controll (even over life and death) to a more moderated controll as informed by Chrisitian ideals. In his introduction, he writes the following:

Medieval theology and law conferred on the father broad authority over his household. his wife, his children, and other members of the household were entrusted as a matter of law, in the firswt instance, to the good judgement of the father, who enjoyed what the canon and Roman lawyers came to call the “right of paternal power.” This was a right grounded on the scriptural teaching that the husband was the “head” of his wife, but it was not a right that was to be used abuseively. Rather it was intended to be utilized in conformity with a broader Christian understanding of the family as a kind of spiritual womb, where children were to be taught above al to know and love God, and spouses were to minister to each other with “maritial affection.” A study of rights and the medieval family mist prpoerly consider both the powers accorded to the father under the rubric of this right of paternal power (ius patria potestatis), and the limitations placed on the scope of this right.” (69)

He is clear to point out, and do so convincingly, that “The canonists and civilians of the tweth and thirteenth centuries did not create their law of domestic relationships on a blank slate. they were instead the inheritors of a substantial doby of law and teaching from late antiquity which sometimes even made use of rights language to describe domestic relationships, although these usages were never worked through systematically” (69). In the following section, entitled “The Impact of Christianity” he continues the narrative, “Christianity, in its earliest forms, adopted and adapted some aspects of the Greco-Roman synthesis on marriage and rejected other aspects altogether. It has been observed that many early Christian metaphors tended to be subversive of the language of authority that surrounded the Roman legal conception of the family. Where Roman law emphasized hierarchical power and submission, Christian metaphors focused on equality” (72).

In summary, Reid writes:

What one sees in the decretalist analysis of the right of paternal power is a careful reworking and systematization of Roman-law sources in the light of Christian revelation and the demands of Christian charity… The right of paternal power, finally, was not absolute. It was conditioned by a series of other rights and obligations. Although women were ordinarily subjected to the authority of their husbands, the law recognized certain areas of equality. Although children were subject to the authority of their fathers, the law recognized that they enjoyed the freedom to make choices, such as the decision to marry. Although fathers possessed a certain freedom to dispose of their property through a will, this testamentary right could not be exercised to the detriment of their children” (96-97).

My Thoughts:

I find Reid’s arguments and historiographical approach much more convincing that Stone’s or evey Herlihy’s. He presents a picture of change and systhesis that seems to be neither overly simplistic nor too complex. I find his understanding of the intersection of two different mindsets, that of the Roman empire and then the Christian faith, to be intelligent and thought-provoking.

David Herlihy, “Family” in Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe (1995), 113-134. (95-106)

Herlihy’s argues that familial ties meant something vastly different in early medieval Europe than they do no. Citing the fact that “the ancients had no exact equivalent to our modern word ‘family’” (114), and that quite to the contrary, the Latin root familia instead “could refer to both persons and property” and “originally meant a band of slaves” (115), Herlihy claims that there was a significantly less amount of domestic affection then than now.

He also brings religious texts into the discussion, most notably St. Augustine, who talks about “ordered” and “disordered” love, or, in other words, a hierarchical prioritization of love and devotion. Paraphrasing Origen from Canticel 2.4, Herlihy writes: “But we do not and should not love all equally. First and foremost, we are to love God. After god, we love in order our parents, our children, and our “domestics,” by which Origen seems to mean both co-residential relatives and servants. Finally, we love our neighbors–those outside our homes,” and continues: “He [Origen] proposed a parallel order of affection in regard to women: we should love first our mothers, who also deserve the highest reverence; then our sisters but not with the same honor; then wives in a special fashion; and then all other women, both relatives and neighbors, according their merit, but always chastely” (122-123).

Herlihy cites as the source of change the instability of the 14th and 15th centuries, summarizing the differences this way: “If Thomas [Aquinas] presented a rather static and detached model of society and family, his approach may mirror the relatively stable stat of medieval society in the placid thirteenth century. In contrast, over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, plagues, famines, wars, and social unrest shook the equilibrium of the medieval world and undermined the serene outlook of its thinkers. The greatest sages in that disturbed epoch tried not so much to construct abstract models of the natural order as to offer moral guidance to perplexed individuals living amid tumultuous surroundings” (129).

After quoting a text containing the recommendations of a priest for individuals not to become too attached to loved ones because of the ineviability of death and separation, he goes on to discuss how by “the late Middle Ages, this sense of an order in loving found expression in secular as well as religious writings. Lay people are, to be sure, slow to acquire voices in medieval vultural history,” but one they did, a new picture begins to develop (which I think has always been there but simply was not expressed in ways that have endured over time for us to read and interpret), about which Herlihy says: “The abundant domestic literature of late medieval Florence further indicates a sharpening division between the family’s inner circle and the surrounding society… The defensive perimeter he drew up encircles the family. The family also was to be taken to a safe locale and given the proper food. The family also had to be treated to the proper cultural diversions to maintain morale, even if they were costly. ‘Hold your family,” Morelli recommended, ‘in pleasure and delight, and seek together with them the good and healthy life’” (131).

My Thoughts:

I am not convinced by his discussion on the origins of the latin word familia as any indication that relationships in the early midieval period were less affectionate. More evidence is needed to make that claim. I see his historiographical approach as following in the footsteps of Lawrence Stone in his intepretation of the change in family over the past 500 years, that is, in seeing a steady progression from dispassionate, formal, defined roles to a more passionate, less controlled, unorganized but very small and nuclear unit.

Similarly, his discussion of texts from religious or other sources does not convince me that their descriptions of the “ideal” was actual the ideal or the common place experience. It may have been what individuals proposed and the church advocated, but I am suspect that it is the most correct representation of the actual relationships.