ABSTRACT
The question that dominated the historical study of English family life until the 1980s was whether the quality of emotional relationships was the same as it is today. The nature of affection has been one of the great areas of debate in the study of the early modern family. The rise of the nuclear or conjugal family, of a couple and their children, and the corresponding fall in the significance of wider kinship and communal bonds, has long been a cherished image among sociologists and social theorists. An investigation of the emotional life of the family in the past still has a significant role in understanding the social world of early modern England, but it is only one possible means of investigating that pattern. In contrast, focusing on the Middle Ages, Barbra Rosenwein coined the term emotional communities', which includes the family, neighbourhoods, the church and guilds, as a mechanism for understanding the overlapping influences on the emotions.
