Marriage and Rural Economy: Western Europe Since 1400. Edited by Isabelle Devos and Liam Kennedy. [Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area, No. 3.] Turnhout: Brepols, 1999. Pp. 292. €55.00.

Extract

Originating in a 1998 seminar in Cambridge, England, the historical essays in this volume explore the connections between the economy, marriage, and demographic change in the rural populations of eight northwestern European countries. Only one of the essays (Richard Smith's, on England) reaches as far back as the medieval era, and one (Theo Engelen's, on European nuptiality) deals primarily with the twentieth century. The other essays concern the period 1600–1900, and the bulk of these employ data from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The editors describe the collection as “[presenting] the current state of research on the European Marriage Pattern” (p. 13), that is, on the distinctive pattern—relatively high ages at first marriage, relatively high proportions of the population not marrying—attributed to northwestern Europe in John Hajnal's seminal 1965 essay (“European Marriage Patterns in Historical Perspective.” In Population in History, edited by David Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, 101–43. Chicago: Aldine.). Hajnal's research hypothesized the pattern, but did not concern itself with the reasons for its existence; by contrast, the present essays seek to describe and interrelate the geographic and temporal variants of the basic pattern, and the long-term changes in the economic contexts in which they appeared. On the whole, these essays perform their task admirably: the editors should be thanked for holding their team together as well as they have, and for producing a volume that does not have the patchwork quality of many conference-based collections.