The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present

Edited by David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller

( Yale University Press, 1991)

The product of a joint effort by a group of historians and anthropologists to advance the understanding of European family life, this book focuses on how and why family life in Italy has changed over a two thousand year period. As the center of an ancient empire and then of Western Christendom, Rome and Italy have had a profound influence on the rest of Europe. While the roots of Western family life cannot be discovered in Italy alone, this collection of essays offers a valuable point from which to begin any investigation of that history. Among other advantages is the fact that Italy is the only place in western Europe for which adequate evidence exists to document family life both before and after the establishment of Christianity, through the Middle Ages, and into the modern area. The volume brings together prominent classical historians, medievalists, and anthropologists in employing a wide variety of kinds of historical evidence to better illuminate the course of Italian--and more generally, Western--family history.

International Editions

Italian edition (La famiglia in Italia dall'antichità al XX secolo) published by Le Lettere (Florence) in 1995

Reviews

"This impressive collection, the product of an interdisciplinary conference, fills an important gap in both the historical and the anthropological literature on family structures and practices in the Western world. The choice of Italy was fortuitous. The availability of two millenia of documentary evidence permits cross-historical comparison within a single case, allowing the reader to see not only the continuities but, just as importantly, diversity and variability through both time and space. A central theme for both historians and anthropologists is the ambiguous relationship between ideology and social practice. This theme is explored not only in relation to traditional demographic and economic concerns, but also in relation to two areas of recent interest: the impact on family life of two powerful institutional and ideological forces, the Catholic Church and the state; and gender ideologies. Because this approach leads to a consideration of how and why societies change, this book will interest not only students of Italian society and culture, but anthropologists and historians generally."
—Choice, (May, 1992) by S. M. DiGiacomo, University of Massachusetts at Amherst