Ancestors: The loving family in Old Europe. (Reviews).

Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 162 pp. $14.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-674-00484-1.

It is tempting, but would be misleading, to call this slim book Steven Ozment's manifesto on the early modern family in Europe. After all, it represents more of a summary of twenty years of numerous publications on the subject rather than the declaration of a new and startling position. Only non-academic readers -- perhaps the intended audience -- will be unfamiliar with Ozment's opinions of his fellow historians of the family as well as of the early modern family itself. Given the author's prominence in the field, though, this distillation of those opinions into one potent punch demands some scrutiny.

For Ozment, the key issue in early modern family history is the question of sentimentality and affectionate relations among family members. Due to the unfortunate influence of certain scholars writing during the 1960s and '70s, many if not most people today -- according to Ozment -- believe that these aspects did not exist (at least not fully) before the late eighteenth century. The chief culprit in this distortion is -- who else -- Philippe Aries, whose works about premodern childhood and attitudes about death inspired other "scholars and pundits" (13), such as Edward Shorter, Jean-Louis Flandrin, and Lawrence Stone, to further propagate this "myth." Some of these historians believed that familial relations improved over time and some believed that they worsened but all agreed that sentimentality and affection were largely alien to the premodern household. After summarizing the writings of five especially influential scholars, Ozment proceeds to offer an alternative perspective, wherein all the elements that the Aries model detected first in the eighteenth century are in fact abundantly evident from at least the time of antiquity. In other words, premodern parents loved their children, premodern spouses often loved one another, and some notions of male-female equality existed before the modern era.

Now again, to early modernists this is hardly an earth-shattering position: numerous monographs and articles over the past twenty years have provided so many counter-proofs to the Aries model that Ozment might appear to be piling on or even flogging a dead horse. Ozment himself acknowledges that the excessively negative view of the premodern family is in retreat among scholars, but rightly notes its continuing influence among non-academics. Since he is one of the few family historians capable of rivaling Aries in general accessibility, this book performs an important public service, stripping our lay contemporaries of facile generalizations about "the bad old days." His examples are colorful, his prose is flawless, and his overall success in bringing long-dead individuals to life is inimitable.

For historians, though, the book raises some unsettling questions about evidence. For while Ozment can convincingly criticize, say Lawrence Stone, for highly selective use of limited sources, it's not clear that he can himself escape similar charges from those who disagree with his conclusions. This is not to say that Ozment's conclusions are wrong or right, merely that excerpts from saints' lives, confessional manuals, letters, and so on provide the slightest of glimpses at what was surely a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. In this book, Ozment only needs to provide evidence from his own research and others' to prove that sentimentality did exist before the eighteenth century. His reliance on qualitative sources, particularly family archives, is well-suited to micro-histories as he has repeatedly proven with previous works. But such an approach also allows Ozment to avoid grappling with the macro-historical changes in the family and the household, questions which the Annalistes and the Cambridge school - whatever their shortcomings -- took head on. Perhaps any generalization about "the European Family" should be suspect but there are several important currents of change that Ozment ignores in service of his "presuppos[ition] that human life is continuous" (2). The only differences he does choose to emphasize are usually those in which the premodern family compares favorably to its modern counterpart, e.g., child abuse and violence against women. Yet does Ozment really believe that: 1. low reporting of such incidents (to which I would add infanticide) equals low occurrence; and 2. that there was less domestic violence then than now? Here I think he should stay true to his overall continuity argument but neither he nor I can provide sufficient evidence for such an assumption. The use of qualitative sources in family history is a two-edged sword that is best wielded very cautiously and -- when possible -- in combination with other weapons in the historian's arsenal.