ABSTRACT
For at least two centuries, the domestic sphere seems to have been the very space defined by emotion and intimacy. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a similar intense and emotion-based childcare would have been unknown. As ‘private sphere’, the household became the family’s home, an idyllic space of rest and peace from a stressful ‘outside’, i.e. the business and political sphere. It became a space of love and affection – a space of emotions. This chapter discusses Aries’s seminal theses on substantial changes in parent–child relationships during the eighteenth century and beyond. It explores changes in marital relations and emotions during the same time span. The chapter looks at the ‘dangerous’ but thrilling emotional relationships of siblings which have been largely ignored by historians but cannot be overestimated regarding the creation of a private ‘space of emotion’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
