Houses and Households: Sampling Pompeii and Herculaneum

Abstract

Abstract The reconstruction of past families in the late medieval and early modern periods has been made possible by an abundance of documentary material, both percise and extensive. Only by careful statistical analysis of such documents, pioneered by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Laslett 1972a etc.), has it been possible to break from Le Play’s simplistic hypothesis of a general historical development from the extended to the nuclear family (Flandrin 1979: 50 ff.).