The History of the Family concerns the changing interactions between family and social, political and religious structures over the last thousand years of European history. The family is usually described in terms of patterns of kinship, inheritance, and relations between sexes and generations. The author examines the contemporary use of these terms and their evolution from nineteenth-century anthropology and social thought. He then considers how these concepts apply to and reveal the nature of European and other societies.

James Casey is Lecturer in European Social History at the University of East Anglia. He is author of The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (1979) and A Social history of Early Modern Spain.