family and household 237
importance accorded to these cultural factors help explain why Smith felt confident
enough to return his now famous verdict that fifteenth-century Tuscans and their
families were not medieval but Mediterranean. The effect of this argument was
strengthened by the publication in rapid succession of influential papers by both
Hajnal (1982) and Laslett (1983) which basically endorsed Smith’s major points.
Laslett, in particular, explicitly used the term “Mediterranean” to cover one of the
four “sets of tendencies in domestic group organization” he proposed for pre-indus-
trial Europe.
Questions of unity and continuity: 30 years of debatesTesting the “Mediterranean model” rapidly became one of the prime goals of research
for historians of family and marriage in southern Europe and the Middle East. By the
late 1980s it was clear that southern Europe had exhibited an unexpected degree of
regional and local variability and that the generalizations and predictions advanced by
Smith, Hajnal and Laslett were open to criticism. Thus, while it was undeniable that
in some areas women (and, often, men as well) had married young, in other areas
marriage had been as late as in north-western Europe. The geography of family forms
had been equally checkered: the most surprising finding was that in both Italy and
Iberia nuclear family households had dominated in the south, whereas more complex
forms appeared to have been typical of central and northern Italy as well as of the
northern regions of Spain and Portugal (Kertzer and Brettell, 1987). What is more,
this evidence was casting serious doubts on the validity of the functional interconnec-
tions which had been postulated between age at marriage and family form. In Spain,
Portugal and Italy, it had been in the southern regions, where neo-locality and nuclear
families had been the norm, that women had married young; in the northern regions,
characterized by higher proportions of complex households, marriage age had been
closer to northwestern levels. Historical studies of Greek localities were still few and
far between, but they too suggested that structurally complex households had pre-
vailed only in mainland Greece and especially in the mountains, with significant dif-
ferences between sedentary peasants and transhumant pastoralists, whereas in the
Aegean and Ionian islands a pattern of early marriage for women and late marriage for
men had coexisted with a predominance of nuclear families (Caftanzoglou, 1994;
Hionidou, 1995).
It is worth noting that a prevalence of neo-local nuclear families had been reported
by most anthropologists who had worked in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus around
the middle of the twentieth century. In Pitt-Rivers’ study of the Andalusian commu-
nity of Alcalá de la Sierra, we read that people “feel very strongly that every family
should possess its own house, and to marry without setting up a separate home is
regarded as a make-shift arrangement” (1971: 99). And Davis wrote of the southern
Italian town where he had carried out his fieldwork that “the commonest domestic
group in Pisticci is the nuclear family; at each marriage, ideally, a new household is set
up” (1973: 42). The existence of extended family households in the Mediterranean
area was acknowledged, but they were assumed to be confined to the Balkans and to
the Middle-Eastern shores, and even there—as Peristiany (1976: 20) argued in sum-
marizing the results of anthropological studies of Mediterranean family structures—
kinship bonds outside the nuclear family were to be seen as constituting “recessive