family and household 239
marriage to take place endogamously so as to prevent part of the patrimony (the
inheritance of women) from leaving the kin group. According to Goody, the break by
which the northern shore of the Mediterranean severed itself (along with the rest of
Europe) from the southern shore came with Christianity. More precisely it started in
the fourth century, when a sect was transforming into a church whose organizational
needs required that a patrimony of landed wealth be built up and defended. This led
the Christian Church to erect a system of rules proscribing or restricting practices—
from adoption to polygyny and endogamy—which favored the keeping of inheritance
within the kin groups. As far as marriage and family are concerned, Goody is thus
positing a unity of the Mediterranean area until approximately the fourth century ce,
and then a break caused not by Islam and the Arab expansion but by Christianization.
Goody’s argument has been highly controversial and has been criticized, among
others, by Smith (1990) whose first step is to reaffirm the differences between north-
ern and southern Europe by emphasizing that a cleavage was already visible in the
Middle Ages, as testified not only by the paradigmatic case of fifteenth-century
Tuscany but also by evidence for Byzantine Macedonia in the fourteenth-century,
when proportions of extended families could exceed 50%, and for the Adriatic city-
state of Ragusa/Dubrovnik between 1400 and 1520, when ruling-class men became
betrothed at an average age of 33, whereas their brides were 18. Once established that
a long-standing regional contrast existed between Mediterranean Europe and the rest
of the continent, Smith boldly proceeds to stress the similarity between the systems of
household formation detectable in census returns from Roman Egypt (Hopkins,
1980: 333–334), in the Tuscan 1427 catasto and in the Algerian national census of
- This amounts to advocating very long-term unity and continuity on both
shores, from antiquity to virtually the present day.
This is a strong, indeed extreme, thesis. It also contravenes the tendency of family
historians to concentrate on Europe and to equate “Mediterranean” with “southern
European,” thereby discarding the possibility of commonalities between marriage and
family patterns on the two shores. As such, it is closer to the proclivity shown by
anthropologists in the third quarter of the twentieth century to treat the Mediterranean
as a unitary field or culture area. Ironically, it was put forward very much in the same
years in which a definite inclination was emerging in anthropological circles to ques-
tion the cultural unity of the Mediterranean, soon to develop into an urge—especially
in anthropological studies of kinship, family and gender in Spain, Italy and Greece—
to move these countries “from the Mediterranean to Europe” (Goddard, 1994).
Nevertheless, a strong thesis like Smith’s and his insistence on regional contrasts and
temporal stabilities may still prove useful as a device to make explicit a number of
substantive and methodological issues which appear to be far from settled, as demon-
strated by two works both published in 2011: a reassessment of the available evidence
on household composition in the ancient Mediterranean by Hübner and a massive
volume where Todd ambitiously attempts to uncover the historical origin of family
systems on a world scale.
Hübner’s starting point is that, although regular census surveys were conducted
throughout the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods, the only ones to survive—
saved for posterity by the dry desert sands—are some tax lists and census returns for
villages and towns of Middle and Upper Egypt in the Ptolemaic and Roman eras, and
only for Roman Egypt is information detailed enough to allow us to study household