ABSTRACT
Alan Macfarlane is professor of anthropological science at the University of Cambridge. Like classicists Jane Harrison and Sarah Humphreys before him, he has consistently brought the questions and methods of British social anthropology to the study of the past. He is a specialist, however, not in ancient Greece and Rome but rather in late medieval and early modern England, His earliest monographs, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England and The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth Century Clergyman, are no doubt "British" in their refined empiricism, but they also bear the clear stamp of his postwar Annalisme. No accident that the subtitle of the latter monograph includes the very term that Jacques Le Goff proffered as something of a slogan for what many of the younger generation of Annalistes, and especially many of those who had read Lévi-Strauss, have declared themselves to be pursuing: historical anthropology. Still, Macfarlane has shown himself willing to pursue at once a historical and an anthropological investigation of subjects, subjectivities, and the dynamics of matters and ideas more vigorously and more controversially than many of his colleagues, whether they be Annalistes, anthropologists, or both. His most controversial monograph remains The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). It complements Dumont's trilogy even while being at odds with much of it. Macfarlane's more recent publications include Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1986). I excerpt a more summary treatment of the relation between forces of an emergent capitalism and the forces of that individualistic ideational complex that Macfarlane calls the "romantic love complex" from The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1987).
