Noble Households in the Sixteenth Century

Study of European households of the medieval and early modern past is a well-established concern in historical research. Households have been considered as material settings and as the groups of people who lived together in those settings. They have also been studied as the location where the most basic human relationships were formed and maintained. Use of such a malleable term as has enabled historians to investigate various characteristics of domestic life: the relationship of the household to production, to community organization, to the affective and political lives of its members. The variability of what might represent-from kin grouping to economic grouping to political grouping-means that use of the term constitutes a very flexible means to the end of reconnecting private and public life in the past. Historians talk about households when they want to get at any of a variety of social, economic, and political relationships by means of domestic arrangements.' Not surprisingly, discussions of the households of elites have reflected the particular historiographic contexts which have shaped the

Political science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History

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