family and household 235
Censuses and census-like materials are not, however, the only sources Mediterranean
family historians can tap: they may also turn to qualitative sources ranging from liter-
ary texts and notarial contracts to court proceedings and ethnographic accounts. The
latter have been extensively used by scholars working on the southern and eastern
shores and on the Balkans, where the paucity of documentary evidence has often
encouraged them to project back into time the descriptions of household composi-
tion and family life left by early ethnographers and then by social anthropologists
between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. This obviously
poses delicate methodological and epistemological issues that have led to debates
within family history and between historians and anthropologists.
It is also worth stressing that most of what we know about the history of marriage
and family on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean comes from
scholars who tend to present themselves as historians of the Middle East and are
unlikely to tackle the vexed question of a possible unity of the family in the
Mediterranean area in the same way as anthropologists have tried to demonstrate, or
deny, the existence of a Mediterranean culture area characterized by distinctive values
such as honor and shame. Nevertheless, historians of the family in the Middle East
have often made efforts to establish whether the marriage patterns and family forms
they have studied fit with the “Mediterranean” model proposed by Peter Laslett and
others in the early 1980s. This model must be considered carefully since it has pro-
vided the dominant framework for comparison—and furious controversy—over the
past three decades.
A long-term Mediterranean pattern of marriage and family?In the 1960s, it was still a widely-held belief among sociologists and historians alike
that since the sixteenth century the large patriarchal households of traditional times,
where married sons lived under the same roof with their aging parents, had gradually
given way to the modern nuclear family. They assumed that the size and composition
of domestic groups had once been very much the same all over Europe and that the
differences which could be observed in the twentieth century were to be explained by
economic or cultural lags caused by differential rates of modernization. This belief
was soon to be shattered by the surprising results of pioneering research in historical
demography. Laslett (1965; 1977) demonstrated that throughout the modern age in
England, and more generally in north-western Europe, households had in fact been
small and simple in structure, as they overwhelmingly consisted only of parents, some
unmarried children and possibly servants, and that marriages had been almost without
exception “neolocal,” in that bride and groom set up their own household instead of
staying with the husband’s family. In another classic work, Hajnal (1965) offered
striking evidence that between the sixteenth and the early twentieth century an imag-
inary line running roughly from St Petersburg to Trieste had separated eastern
Europe, where marriage had been early and almost universal, from north-western
Europe, which had been characterized by a pattern whose distinctive marks were a
late age at marriage for both men and women and a high proportion of people who
never married at all.
These unexpected findings indicated that new maps of family forms and marriage
patterns in historic Europe had to be drawn. However, while the contrast looked very