The Sentimental Family

A Biohistorical Perspective

Bibliographic Data

ID9420388
AuthorsK Harper (0000-0001-9313-0725, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume119
Issue5
Pages1547-1562
Publication date2014-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/ahr/119.5.1547
OpenAlexW2329411361
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

PUBLISHED L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Re ́gime, a study that helped launch social history on the study of private life. 1 Arie `s located a major transformation in the "sentimental climate" of the family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the new climate brought greater sensitivity toward childhood as a special stage of life, the expulsion of non-nuclear residents such as servants and lodgers from the domicile, greater solicitude for early development, and more privacy within the family.By associating these characteristics-sentimentality, nuclearity, investment, privacy-with modernity, Arie `s gave impetus to the search for the "modern family" in other societies.Probably the most famous contribution in this vein was Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. 2Stone's model of development, while more complex, still posited a trajectory toward intimacy, companionship, and affection within family relations.This sort of historical work was pioneering both in the subjects it sought to understand and in the sorts of documents it called upon as sources of knowledge about the human past.In concert, the study of gender, the family, and sexuality developed into one of the most prominent and successful subfields of the historical discipline. 3 As the study of private life matured, two contradictory tendencies emerged. 4 On the one hand, a number of historians emphasized the striking otherness of the past and the profound differences between historical experiences of the family and the present; stunning anecdotes of casual cruelty or arresting examples of past reproductive arrangements underwrote a rhetoric of defamiliarization.On the other hand, an inevitable debunking ensued, as a second generation of researchers set out to find evidence for such things as nuclearity and sentimentality in the premodern family.Inevitably, they did so.The Roman family, for example, proved to be far more nu-1

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