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Carol
Neel, ed.
Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children.
University of Toronto Press, April/May 2004.
MART: The Medieval Academy
Reprints for Teaching no. 40.
320pp.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback ISBN 0802036066 $75.00/£48.00
Paperback ISBN 0802084583 $27.50/£18.00
During the past thirty
years, the study of medieval families has emerged as a focus of
discussion in European history. Largely unexplored in professional
publications and teaching curricula until the 1970s, family history is
now accepted as an aspect of medieval history essential to the
development of the period's institutions and culture, and a field
useful to comparative family studies.
The present volume brings together essays by historians, art
historians, and literary scholars about the structures, social
functions, and emotional characteristics of families in the middle
ages, from demographic, legal, theological, art historical, and
literary sources according to a broad array of theoretical approaches.
Presenting these materials in the chronological order of its
constituent articles' publication, the collection reveals how scholars
of the 1970s through the 1990s argued the importance of previously
unconsidered questions about the shape of medieval familial experience,
and how their mutual information and criticism has refined and added to
this investigation in the intervening period. The introduction and
bibliography enable both beginning students and medievalists newly
interested in family studies to set the articles gathered here in the
context of the later twentieth-century transformation of medieval
studies and, more broadly, historical scholarship. These supporting
materials, like the eleven articles, affirm the profoundly
interdisciplinary character of contemporary medieval studies.
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