The Family, Sex And Marriage: In England 1500-1800
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Few works have so fundamentally reshaped our understanding of private life as Lawrence Stone's monumental The Family, Sex and Marriage: In England 1500-1800 — a sweeping, meticulously researched chronicle of how the most intimate human relationships were formed, contested, and transformed across three turbulent centuries of English history. Stone presents a panoramic social history that tracks the evolution of the family unit from the cold, emotionally distant households of the Tudor period, bound by property and patriarchal authority, through to the warmer, affection-centred companionate marriages of the Georgian era, arguing that a profound revolution in human feeling quietly reshaped English society from within. Drawing on an extraordinary breadth of primary sources — diaries, letters, legal records, and ecclesiastical court documents — Stone constructs a richly textured portrait of how attitudes toward love, sexuality, childhood, and domestic life underwent a seismic shift. His prose is authoritative yet accessible, and his argument remains one of the most ambitious and debated in the field of social history, inviting readers to question just how natural the modern family truly is. Whether one accepts or challenges his thesis, The Family, Sex and Marriage stands as an indispensable landmark of historical scholarship that continues to provoke and illuminate in equal measure.
Author: Lawrence Stone
Format: Hardback
Published: 1977, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Genre: British & Irish history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Few works have so fundamentally reshaped our understanding of private life as Lawrence Stone's monumental The Family, Sex and Marriage: In England 1500-1800 — a sweeping, meticulously researched chronicle of how the most intimate human relationships were formed, contested, and transformed across three turbulent centuries of English history. Stone presents a panoramic social history that tracks the evolution of the family unit from the cold, emotionally distant households of the Tudor period, bound by property and patriarchal authority, through to the warmer, affection-centred companionate marriages of the Georgian era, arguing that a profound revolution in human feeling quietly reshaped English society from within. Drawing on an extraordinary breadth of primary sources — diaries, letters, legal records, and ecclesiastical court documents — Stone constructs a richly textured portrait of how attitudes toward love, sexuality, childhood, and domestic life underwent a seismic shift. His prose is authoritative yet accessible, and his argument remains one of the most ambitious and debated in the field of social history, inviting readers to question just how natural the modern family truly is. Whether one accepts or challenges his thesis, The Family, Sex and Marriage stands as an indispensable landmark of historical scholarship that continues to provoke and illuminate in equal measure.