This is a concise, yet wide-ranging, history of the family in Europe from antiquity to the present day.

Jack Goody is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge from 1973 to 1985. He has written extensively on the family, memory, ritual, and literacy, in a wide variety of regional and historical contexts. His many books include Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), The East and West (1996), Representations and Contradictions (Blackwell, 1997) and Food and Love (1999).