RURAL HOUSEHOLD ORGANIZATION AND INHERITANCE IN NORTHERN EUROPE

David Gaunt

ABSTRACT:

By focusing on morphological continuity, family historians may be neglecting long-term changes within the family that are documented in non-numerical sources. Evidence from Finland suggests that researchers need to reexamine the history of the suurperhe ("large family"). Similarly, evidence from the Scandinavian peninsula suggests that the early modern centuries witnessed the growth of privacy in generational relations, the emergence of the father-son dyad as the preferred method of land transfer, the separation of landownership from household authority, and the use of the courts to solve family problems. Thus there may have been transformations in family life in the long term that unchanging measures of mean size do not capture.

David Gaunt is Lecturer in history at the University of Umeå and a research director at the Secretariat for Future Studies in Stockholm, Sweden.

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