The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe

16th to 19th Century

Joachim Eibach, Margareth Lanzinger, Joachim Eibach, Margareth Lanzinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367647193
• eBook ISBN: 9780429631740
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This book addresses the multifaceted history of the domestic sphere in Europe from the Age of Reformation to the emergence of modern society. By focusing on daily practice, interaction and social relations, it shows continuities and social change in European history from an interior perspective.

The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe contains a variety of approaches from different regions that each pose a challenge to commonplace views such as the emergence of confessional cultures, of private life, and of separate spheres of men and women. By analyzing a plethora of manifold sources including diaries, court records, paintings and domestic advice literature, this volume provides an overview of the domestic sphere as a location of work and consumption, conflict and cooperation, emotions and intimacy, and devotion and education. The book sheds light on changing relations between spouses, parents and children, masters and servants or apprentices, and humans and animals or plants, thereby exceeding the notion of the modern nuclear family.

This volume will be of great use to upper-level graduates, postgraduates and experienced scholars interested in the history of family, household, social space, gender, emotions, material culture, work and private life in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe.

Part I

Language and discourse

1

Domestic terminologies

House, household, family

Jon Mathieu

Introduction

“The main problem for the evolution of the family is to understand just what is evolving”, stated Jack Goody back in 1972:

The English term ‘family’ is a polysemic word used to describe a conjugal pair and their young (‘starting a family’), the members of a household (‘one of the family’), a range of bilateral kin (‘relatives’) or a patronymic group, usually associated with a title (‘The Churchill family’). There are also wider semantic usages, extending to the human (‘the family of man’) and non-human (‘the family of sweet peas’) species.¹

One way to deal with this problem is to look at the evolution of the term itself. How did its polysemy change over time? How were the different meanings clarified through context and specific speech situations? What was the term’s position within a larger semantic field, and how did this position change?

The following chapter gives an outline of domestic terminologies in Europe since the sixteenth century, focusing on the trajectories of three central notions: house, household and family with various family specifications (stem, bourgeois, nuclear). The exploration considers six major European languages. The coverage, however, is not homogeneous but selective and problem-oriented. Issues connected to the encompassing field of family history will be privileged. Since Goody’s statement in 1972, terminological research has not progressed as one would have expected, and more attention has been paid to the Middle Ages than to the modern period. With only a few exceptions, our topic leads a life at the footnote level: researchers remarking every now and then that a more systematic approach would be helpful. Only recently have two authoritative scholars reiterated that call.²

The relation between language and social history is complicated. Words can remain constant in their outer form but change their meaning significantly. According to a French historian, the noun ‘lineage’ (Latin ‘linea’) was used in the general, bilateral sense of ‘relatives’ or ‘kindred’ in the Middle Ages, whereas later it usually designated a male line of descent.³ New words, on the other hand, do not necessarily express new realities. Some scholars suggest that the term ‘family’, which proliferated from the early modern period onwards, only replaced other utterances such as ‘house’ with no change in social setup whatsoever.⁴ Thus, language does not automatically reflect or shape reality, yet it can clearly do so under certain circumstances.

This chapter is based on entries in standard historic dictionaries and encyclopaedias, enriched by a number of political, philosophical and scientific texts.⁵ Thanks to electronic tools, these sources are currently much more accessible than some ten years ago. Further support is provided by the Ngram Viewer of Google Books, whose first version was released in 2010. Based on the full texts of millions of printed books, transformed into digital format, the Ngram Viewer allows word-frequency searches for different languages since 1500. It has been criticized because of its unbalanced and undifferentiated corpora and misreading of certain characters. There is also a discussion about the value of micro-semantics and the respective significance of lexicographic inventories and word-frequency analyses.⁶ However, there is little doubt that the Ngram Viewer can be useful for a more systematic view on the subject.

Here, a path has been chosen between this quantitative approach and qualitative research. On the quantitative side, one should not overestimate the accuracy and informative value of word-frequency figures. On the qualitative side, it is important to pay attention to the variable uses of domestic terms. Depending on the context, they can be either more descriptive or prescriptive and normative. Particularly interesting are the historical situations in which these terms are played off against each other. This confers on them a stronger relation to social structure, produced by the actors themselves.

The next section gives an outline of previous research in the field. We will then look at translations of domestic terms in the long sixteenth century, before proceeding from the house-variants to family-terms. Conclusions return to the question of the relationship between domestic terminology and social history.

Research to date

Research on domestic terminology past and present has been done in history, linguistics and anthropology, sometimes with blurred boundaries between these disciplines. In history, for the present purpose, I would like to point to three remarkable contributions. In 1975, Dieter Schwab wrote a well-known article for the historical lexicon of politico-social language in Germany that examined a vast body of texts in order to map the development of ‘family’ in relation to ‘house’. According to Schwab, sufficiently sharp notions of single families or family households emerged only in the late Middle Ages through the professionalization of legal culture and the renewal of ancient economics in philosophy and theology. German authors, as a rule, used the word ‘house’ to translate the Aristotelian term ‘oikos’. The word proliferated in new advice books for elite families, the Hausbücher, but also in religious literature and sermons which reached the larger population. Scholars and theologians understood the house as part of the state and charged it with moral doctrines. Their theories produced a model for, rather than an image of, social reality. In contrast to this German tradition, Latin literature, which dominated the international learned culture for a long time, translated the term ‘oikos’ mostly to ‘family’. The same applies to authors writing in French and other Romance languages. Thus, Schwab portrays a parallel linguistic development of ‘house’ (in German) and ‘family’ (in Latin and Romance languages) against the backdrop of similar social settings. Influenced by French and Latin usage, the word ‘family’ expanded in German speaking territories in the eighteenth century, yet according to Schwab, the new expression did not evoke new ideas: “The house-concept of economics and of natural law is carried on as family-concept.”⁷

David W. Sabean, in a detailed study of family and kinship in a village near Stuttgart published in 1990, examines thousands of court protocols of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to elucidate popular language and discourse. Interestingly, the noun ‘house’ is documented only twice in his large corpus. Usually the villagers used the active verb ‘to house’ (hausen) for aspects of domestic life. Its basic meaning was to run a household, live together in a household or, more specifically, live together in marriage. Thus, the question Hausest Du schon? was tantamount to asking: are you already married?⁸ Sabean’s investigation suggests that morally charged nouns of the elite terminology – as described by Schwab – were not indispensable for popular speech. Verbal expressions played an important role in local interaction, and context could render domestic group terms superfluous. According to various indications, similar specific practices prevailed in other villages, regions and languages.⁹

The third contribution refers to Naomi Tadmor’s 1996 article about the concept of the household-family in eighteenth century England. She too aims to reconstruct social perceptions through language use and studied a personal diary, conduct books and popular novels, all written by authors of the middling sort. The word ‘family’ was well established in this milieu and period, and usually described the persons living in one household, kin and servants alike. Kin could encompass the wife of the family’s head, his children and other relatives. But a family could also be composed only of the head (mostly male, occasionally female) and servants. Relatives living elsewhere were generally not included. The designation usually remained stable while the exact household composition could change rapidly. In a well-documented case, the persons living as one ‘family’ for certain periods between 1756 and 1765 added up to at least 11, although only two to five persons lived together at any one time. Alongside, or in conjunction with, this concept of family-household there were other significations, particularly the concept of family as a lineage stressing diachronic continuity. Thus the wide range of polysemy, alluded to at the beginning of this paper, was not a novelty of the twentieth century.¹⁰

Between history and linguistics, we find a broad and fragmented field of approaches with different perspectives, methodologies and scholarly traditions. Generally, the social history of language promoted by Peter Burke and colleagues provides useful contextual information.¹¹ Conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) in the tradition of Reinhart Koselleck remains – despite efforts to the contrary – largely centred on German discussions, and it has a problematic relationship to discourse history and linguistic investigations.¹² In linguistics proper there are two or three subfields pertinent to our question: historical semantics and pragmatics, and historical lexicology, all of which at times interrelate with anthropology.¹³ Nowadays, historical semantics generally puts less emphasis on etymology than it has previously. To be sure, ‘family’ derives from the Latin ‘familia’ that scholars have linked to the word ‘famulus’ meaning servant or slave. In Roman times, ‘familia’ was often used to refer to such subjects of a specific person, and similarly so in the Middle Ages. There is, however, also a long history of alternative uses of ‘familia’ and the so-called ‘original meaning’ of the term is not really relevant when it comes to examining the semantics of a given period. What counts is the language practice of that period.¹⁴

An interesting lexicological study has been conducted by William J. Jones in his 1990 book on German Kinship Terms (750–1500). He takes up a classical anthropological issue and follows designations for mother’s brother, mother’s sister and so on, through their diachronic and synchronic variations during the Middle Ages. In a later contribution to a lexicological handbook his approach is more methodological: “In kinship, it is fruitful not only to trace words with their changing kin references (‘senses’), but also to observe the changing lexical designations for specific family relations”. Thus, besides exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: continuities and transformations in the history of the domestic sphere
• PART I: Language and discourse
• PART II: Legal settings and domestic hierarchies
• PART III: The domestic sphere as space of work
• PART IV: Leisure and sociability
• PART V: Consumption and material culture
• PART VI: Domestic conflict and violence
• PART VII: Emotions and intimacy
• PART VIII: Child-rearing and education
• PART IX: Privacy and the emergence of separate spheres?
• PART X: Semi-public spaces
• PART XI: The domestic sphere as a religious space
• PART XII: Health and food preparation
• PART XIII: Animals and plants
• PART XIV: Images and identity constructs
• Index