ABSTRACT
If trying to grasp the popular understanding of something as fluid and complex as the marital union today is no easy task, trying to understand marriage 250 years ago is significantly more difficult. In Britain and Western Europe between 1650 and 1750, family relationships and the nature of marriage are considered by many historians to fundamentally change. Lawrence Stone and Randolph Trumbach believe that changing attitudes to the aristocracy’s paternal role in the seventeenth century led to weakened networks of kinship and clientage, which combined with a rise in the power of the state and the spread of Protestantism, isolated the newly-formed nuclear household. This initially resulted in a patriarchal form of family life, but gave way to affective individualism by the eighteenth century. The weakening of patrimony meant community regulation was less viable and families more isolated, creating more emotive relationships within the family and less need for control over wives and children.1 Others have challenged the idea of such sweeping change. For many historians, the pre-industrial family was neither starkly authoritarian nor lacking in affection. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott argue that women’s vital economic role within the pre-industrial household gave them considerable authority within a patriarchal society.2 Martine Segalen, who studies peasantry in France, shows some degree of equality between the sexes, while Amanda Vickery suggests love and affection were as important to seventeenth-century society as patriarchal control.3 The rise of the individual and its impact on the family has been similarly questioned, with Joy
1 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977); Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: aristocratic kinship and domestic relations in eighteenth-century England (London, 1978).
