The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800During the period 1500 - 1800 there were massive changes in world social and cultural systems, and the family unit as we recognize it today came into being. The emphasis on the individual, the right to personal freeedoms and the desire for privacy developed during this period and were symptomatic of world-wide shifts in attitude that also affected religion and politics. This is a study of the evolution of the family, from the (to us) impersonal, economically bonded and precarious extended family group of the sixteenth century to the smaller, affectively bonded nuclear unit that had appeared by the end of the eighteenth century, and shows how this process radically influenced child-rearing, education, contraception, sexual behaviour and marriage. This work challenges many of the conventional views hitherto held about English society at that period. |
Contents
Problems Methods and Definitions | 3 |
Historiography | 15 |
DEFINITION OF TERMS | 21 |
Copyright | |
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adults affection attitudes Autobiography became behaviour Boswell bourgeoisie cent child Church classes court cultural daughter death decline diary died domestic Dr Johnson early eighteenth century Early Modern early seventeenth century economic eighteenth century elite England English evidence father female France Francis Place friends gentry George Crabbe girl heir History household husband Ibid illegitimacy individual infant James Boswell kinship labour Lady Lady's Magazine late eighteenth century late seventeenth century late sixteenth later lineage lived London Lord male marriage married Mary Mary Wollstonecraft middle mistress moral mother nineteenth century nuclear family obedience Oliver Heywood Oxford parents parish patriarchal Pepys period political poor population practice pregnancy primogeniture psychological punishment Puritan religious rise romantic love servants seventeenth century sexual Simonds D'Ewes sixteenth century social society squirarchy Thomas took upper-class village wet-nurse widow wife wives woman women young