ABSTRACT
In what remains one of the most fully documented accounts of its subject Stone (1977) argued that, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ‘open lineage’ (or extended) family was replaced by the nuclear family and that, correspondingly, the notion of marriage as a matter of duty and parental arrangement yielded to a marital ideal of loving companionship. He further distinguished between the ‘patriarchal nuclear family’ of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period and, in what he calls the ‘decisive shift’ (p. 7), the development in the later seventeenth century of the less hierarchical ‘closed domesticated nuclear family’. In itself, this thesis was not novel; historians have long argued that Protestantism introduced a more positive view of the marriage partnership than that held by Medieval Catholicism. Stone’s development of it, however, has come in for a good deal of criticism (see Ferguson (1985), p. 40, n. 13, for a succinct listing of texts, of which Houlbrooke (1984) and Ezell (1987) are the most substantial), much of it alleging that he minimizes lacunae and contradictions in the evidence and exaggerates the degree of change which occurred in both the theory and practice of marriage. It is characteristic of his critics to doubt that the extended family ever existed in any meaningful sense (Laslett (1983), pp. 90-6) and to hold, like Houlbrooke (1984), that ‘Six hundred years ago the nuclear family was the basic element in English society as it still is today’ (pp. 14-15).
