Marriage and European Views Fertility - Judeo-christian Tradition, Puberty And Marriage, Consensual Unions, Marriage Covenant, Later Marriage
social
Prior to the nineteenth century, the image of the patriarchal family was a crucial component of both moral injunction (as in the Judeo-Christian fourth commandment to "honor thy father and mother") and political organization. Marriage was the keystone in the arch of social solidarities; it also signaled the creation of a new reproductive unit. For the individuals involved, marriage was at once a moment of social and personal transformation. To be married was an essential attribute of adult status. However the sexual bond at the core of these marriages was more problematic.
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Its inheritance of intertestamentary Judaism, more particularly from the radical fringes that had a fanatical devotion to self-abnegation and ritual purity, gave ancient Christianity a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward the body and sexuality. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, it was better to marry than to burn with desire (1 Cor. 7:33). Marital sexual relations were given a grudging acc…
Historical demographers have provided further evidence that the early modern, northwestern European practice of deferred marriage among women was not common in earlier periods among Mediterranean populations in which few girls seem to have delayed marriage much beyond puberty. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, teenaged girls were married to adult men in their thirties as was the case among the …
The emergence of the discrete, single-family household was a landmark, which coincided with the Church's insistence on consensual unions. It separated the couple from its wider networks of clan and lineage thereby making the reproduction of families into an affair of two individuals although for most propertied peasants this was more a matter of ideology than everyday life. But because the …
The couple's marriage covenant had several dimensions—first there was the settlement of material goods and landed property; second there was the public trothplight by which the couple announced their intentions; and third there was the wedding in the Church and the ring ceremony. In most cases, these three stages followed one another in an orderly succession. However there was no nee…
Prior to the advent of parish registers in the sixteenth century, very little is known about ages at first marriage for either men or women. Surveying the published statistical evidence from fifty-four studies, Michael Flinn describes an early modern northwestern, Europe family system in which the average age at first marriage for women fluctuated around twenty-five. Flinn does not provide measure…
The family production unit's reliance on its own labor power merely served to expose it, nakedly, when the terms of trade swung violently against it after the mid-nineteenth century. Simple, repetitive tasks by which women and children had contributed significantly to the domestic economy of the peasant household inexorably declined in the face of competition from, first, specialized produc…
The organization of national social systems of education and welfare during the last decades of the nineteenth century combined with the spread of public health measures, which radically changed children's chances of survival, to provide the historical context in which the ongoing revolution in the family was keynoted by the decline in fertility. The average English woman marrying in the 18…
Indeed in the course of modernization—roughly coinciding with urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of the modern state, that is, from about 1750, and with increasing intensity after 1870—there was a gradual elevation in the importance of the wedding. In the earlier social formations, the wedding was the final stage in a marriage process by which two people pledged themselves…
Yet just as the image of the white wedding was at its zenith, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, other forces were at work redefining the culture of marriage. The modern sentimental marriage is, in the early twenty-first century, widely perceived to be in crisis. Since the late-twentieth century, society seems to be in the process of making a different social system in a global world, …
Bernardes, Jan. "Do We Really Know What "The Family" Is?" In Family and Economy in Modern Society, edited by Paul Close and Rosemary Collins. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1985. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Duby, Georges. The Knight, the Lady, a…
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