This contribution investigates how religion retarded the Dutch fertility transition by looking at how denominations were associated with the timing of first births (starting), the length of birth intervals (spacing), and the timing of last births (stopping). First, we apply a simple descriptive model of starting, spacing, and stopping to life-course data from the province of Utrecht. Then, we apply multivariate regression to assess the independent effects of religious denominations, net of socio-economic status, on stopping behaviour. The results indicate that liberal Protestants were more prone to adopt stopping behaviour than orthodox Protestants and Catholics.

This article examines the relative incidence of poverty among the elderly in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire with special reference to gender. Both national and local sources are employed to highlight the particular difficulties experienced by the elderly, male poor under the New Poor Law, and the short and long term problems they faced as a result of seasonal unemployment and an overstocked labour market. For elderly women, the extent to which their poverty was relieved by employment in cottage industry, almshouse accommodation, the continuing receipt of out-relief and a higher incidence of family support are examined to provide an assessment of the manner in which poverty was gendered in the nineteenth century.

This article seeks to place second-hand consumption, or the reuse of older objects, into the expanding historical literature on early modern consumer practices. It claims that the study of second-hand consumption remains a much neglected topic of historical interest. Further empirical research of pre-industrial reuse habits is needed to examine essential problems and inconsistencies concerning consumers and their handling of older goods. On the basis of rarely used sources relating to public auctions in the countryside of the southern Netherlands, key questions regarding the current debate will be addressed. These questions concern the products that were handled, the actors involved, and how reuse was (or was not) affected by broader changes in society.

We compare Montreal's three largest cultural communities – French Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant – with respect to infant survival over the forty years 1860–1900. From three birth cohorts we present evidence for a powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic politics, and spatial segregation.

The structure of nineteenth-century Greek households remains largely unknown. The handful of published articles and books based on quantitative analysis suggest the existence and persistence of many household forms among Greek populations. The most extensive study, and the only one dealing with an urban population, focuses on Athens. In The Making of the modern Greek family, Sant Cassia and Bada argue that an ‘urban model’ had emerged by the 1830s. Adopted from the nikokirei ‘upper-class’ group, households were characterized by equal partibility of parental property among sons and daughters, the generous endowment of daughters at marriage and ‘a tendency towards neolocality’ (the formation of an independent household on marriage). Gradually, this ‘Athenian model’ of property transmission and household organization ‘was legitimized by the church and by popular literature, and eventually became the cultural norm not merely for townspeople but for those in the countryside as well’. The authors are eager to point out that these ‘family forms and patterns of property transmission in Greece, especially in urban areas, are “new” rather than continuations of traditional rural patterns’, implying the ‘export’ of these new forms from the Athenian to other urban and rural populations.

In this article, we study variations in co-residence with kin in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use the reconstructed life courses of 17,527 individuals derived from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) database. The life-course approach allows us to look at co-residence from the perspectives of both the receiving households and the co-resident kin. What made households take in relatives and do we find a preference for one type of relative over another? What was the background of people who decided to co-reside in another household? How important were family-related ‘altruistic’ motives compared with economic ones? The outcomes suggest the predominance of altruistic motives for co-residence, apart from persistent inheritance customs in the eastern part of the country.

This article produces the first findings on changes in household and family structure in England and Wales during 1851–1911, using the recently available Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) – a complete count database of individual-level data extending to some 188 million records. As such, it extends and updates the important overview article published in Continuity and Change by Michael Anderson in 1988. The I-CeM data shed new light on transitions in household structure and family life during this period, illustrating both continuities and change in a number of key areas: family composition; single parent families; living alone; extended households; childhood; leaving home and marriage patterns.

In the eighteenth century the newspaper became the most important source for the printed dissemination of criminological stories and information. In bringing together thousands of narratives about crime and justice it far outstripped any other printed source of the period. As the primary literary means of accessing stories and information about crime, it is likely that newspapers influenced their readers' perceptions of and attitudes towards crime and the justice system. This article offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the crime content of one provincial newspaper, The Kentish Post, or Canterbury Newsletter. The study reveals the newspaper to have been constructed to a template, which privileged crime as one of its most important subjects. However, the editorial imperatives of compiling a regular text with an unprecedented number of stories resulted in a discourse of the nature, causes and consequences of crime very different to that expounded in the pamphlet literature, which had been the mainstay of printed discourses about crime before the arrival of newspapers and with which historians are more familiar.

The article highlights the significance of alliances of blood and marriage in early modern England and beyond, including both positive and negative relations among kin. Examining different historiographical approaches, it emphasizes the role of kinship in explanations of historical change and continuity. Rather than focusing on the isolated nuclear family or, conversely, on an alleged decline of kinship, it highlights the importance of enmeshed patterns of kinship and connectedness. Such patterns were not only important in themselves (whether culturally, socially, economically, or politically), it is suggested, but they also invite new comparisons with other early modern societies, and in the long run. Even patterns typical of present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’, or aspects of the present-day language of kinship may bring to mind some similarities with notions of kinship and related ‘household-family’ ties characteristic of the early modern period, the article proposes.

Following on from ‘Married and not: Weston's grown children in 1268–1269’, this article places the Lincolnshire village of Weston within a realm-wide context to demonstrate that, as the rural economy stumbled after c. 1250, many young women and men either delayed marriage or could not marry at all. The European Marriage Pattern (late marriage for some and no marriage for others) can be discerned in England long before the socio-economic adjustments that followed the Black Death, and it grew mainly from poverty, not prosperity.

This article explores the policies of the Bulgarian socialist regime (1944–1989) towards the family. Initially, the Bulgarian Communist Party focussed on the abolition of the patriarchal family, the emancipation of women and the struggle against ‘bourgeois residues’ in family life. However, the dramatic decline of the birth rate – a result of rapid urbanization and increasing female employment – led to a re-direction of official discourse. Reproduction became heavily politicized, as the 1968 ban on abortion makes evident. Despite pro-natalist measures, the government was unable to stop the fertility decline. This article demonstrates how socialist family policy was gradually modified through negotiation between the Party and the population.

In the course of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in Western Europe, ways of transferring and redistributing land outside the market were replaced by market transactions. This, however, was by no means a general and unilinear process, but one that displays strong regional differences and temporal discontinuities. This article aims to gain more insight in the factors underlying these differences, by reconstructing and analysing the institutional organization of exchange in land and lease markets. The analysis, undertaken for northwestern Europe and Italy, points to the socio-political context as a main determinant of this organization.

Philanthropy was enduring in early modern Europe. For centuries local charities gave small sums that helped many people to survive. Such charity can be studied from below, from the persepective of survival strategies, and from above, from the perspective of social control, but it can also be studied as scholars of philanthropic studies do for contemporary societies. This article does the latter. It pays attention to benefactors and benefactions; how many people gave and who were they?; when, where and what did benefactors give, and what were their motives? The article places an in-depth study of Amsterdam from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century in the context of the literature on early modern European philanthropy.