The Origins of the European Marriage Pattern in Early Modern Period from the Perspective of Polish Historiography (original) (raw)
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Filosifija Sociologija
This article explores the link between historical and contemporary patterns of family formation. The theoretical underpinnings of the study were derived from Hajnal's theory of historical nuptiality regimes in Europe. In general, the results suggest that all countries in the region share a common vector of changes in partnership formation, but at the same time the onset and advancement of these changes varies. The changes started earlier and have advanced further in countries that had experienced the western European marriage pattern in the past, and they began later and are less advanced in the countries with the historical eastern European marriage pattern.
In their modelling and classificatory ventures western scholars have usually mistakenly included family forms in historical Eastern Europe by induction in well-established generalizations about Russian or Balkan populations. At the same time, well into the late 1990s, most of Eastern European historians have shown no interest in studying domestic groups in socio-historical perspective. This article attempts to restate that picture through a thorough analysis of an unprecedented collection of historical household data for the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largests political entities in Europe of that time. Through an application of a variety of methodologies three regional family patterns have been distinguished on the historical Polish territories, their main characteristics described and then juxtaposed against the major features of paradigmatic examples of the 'Eastern European family type'. The results indicate that the existing models of household systems in preindustrial Europe are far too rigid to meet the diversity of residential patterns of the Eastern European serfs. Analysis of the data set on spatially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse regions has also facilitated a preliminary identification of the factors shaping these family systems. The data presented here suggests that the conventional wisdom regarding the institutional mechanisms of the Eastern European manorialism of the second serfdom as sufficient to create a homogenous pattern of family residence must be seriously questioned. In particular, what must be meticulously revised is a sweeping generalization still in practice that posits a functional link between coercive forms of labor control and complex household structures among peasant subjects.
The constructivist approach of this volume underpins our desire to investigate what we have named 'layers of power' in Europe. By this we refer to the scales of social organisation that are present in all historical periods, regardless of the geographical, political, economic or cultural make-up of a specific society. The 'layer' of power that presents itself most self-evidently as the primary social unit in which human beings have coexisted, and which formulates the rules of that existence, is the family. It is in familial relations that "many of the most distinctive features of human life are most clearly and unambiguously illustrated" 1 . The family is sui generis a layer of power, as it contains mechanisms through which it influences intrapersonal and interpersonal concepts and activities. One of these mechanisms is marriage, an institution whose origins and early development cannot be pinned down conclusively, but whose omnipresence we experience daily. As a source of certain rights and duties within and outside the community, marriage, over time, has been converted into a matter of law. This chapter explores the development of marital law in Europe and compares different marriage laws which coexisted (and still do) in Jewish, western Christian and Islamic communities. Chronologically, it concentrates primarily on the medieval period as the crucial phase in the development of marriage law for all these religious groups, for it was then when these laws were refined from customary and ritual practice into codified legal acts. This, in turn, created the foundation for present-day marital legislation, thus contributing to a common European cultural heritage.
2015
This reply reviews the evidence presented by Dennison and Ogilvie that the European Marriage Pattern did not contribute to economic growth in Early Modern Europe (EMP). First, we argue that the link between the EMP and economic growth is not conceptualized correctly. Age of marriage is not a correct index of the degree to which countries were characterized by EMP. Secondly, we show that our alternative interpretation of the EMP, focusing on the underlying institutions and the related balance of power between men and women, solves this problem. We find a strong correlation between economic growth and female agency.
2011
This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent "Eastern European family pattern." This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by R. Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's original observation of non-negligible spatial variation within the supposedly homogenous North-Western European marriage and family pattern is used here as a starting point to show the true diversity of familial organization in Eastern Europe, which had been placed at the other end of the spectrum of what was long believed to be a dichotomous division in European family systems. The diversity of family forms and the rhythms of their development in historical Eastern Europe presented in this literature should finally free us from a simplistic view of the continent's familial history, and especially from the perspective implied by the notion of a "dividing line."