Social History
The Family
There are a number of misperceptions and misunderstandings about the structure and nature of families during our period. Rather than try to sort through them all, I'll handle most of them with a simple statement: if it's simple, it's wrong.
There were many different arrangements in family structure, as many as in modern times, if not more. The very word is problematic, and historians—particularly historical demographers—rather prefer to use the word household. Families varied from one region to another, varied across the span of a generation, varied by economic and social circumstance. That's why I say that any statement that early modern families were any one thing in particular are ipso facto wrong, or at least misleading.
It's easy enough to say families were different. That much really ought to be self-evident. The more difficult, historical question is: how were families similar? And in their differences, can we see patterns that can be explained, or that offer insight into other questions?
Definitions
Before launching into the details, a quick word about words. What does the word family mean? How does that differ from household? Were there connotations peculiar to the early modern era?
Household is the easiest to define. It had a fairly precise legal meaning: a single hearth—all those living under the same roof. Use of the word hearth was significant, for it signified all those who shared the same cooking and heating fire. This was a bit more precise than "under one roof" because a building might have multiple households within it. But rarely did they have more than one hearth. Household also had legal meaning for purposes of taxation, as well as for levying troops and other public reckoning. This lets us know that the society at the time recognized it as a legitimate social unit.
Family is more elusive. Probably the most significant difference between modern (industrialized) and pre-modern understanding of family is that in a modern family servants aren't considered family. In many and diverse documents, though, we find early modern (and medieval) people regarding live-in servants as members of their family. In some areas, we even find other dependents (e.g., clientela in Italy) encompassed by the word famiglia.
If you think about it, the word is fairly elastic for us, too. Sometimes we mean parents and children only. Other times, we mean to include parental siblings or grandparents. Other times we stretch the word to include anyone related, however distant, as in the case of "family reunion." So, too, in pre-modern society. Just because we read the word familia in a document doesn't mean we immediately know what that word entailed in that context.
This becomes really important when analyzing and when trying to draw conclusions. What can we say about "average family size" when we aren't sure what that meant? Or when we know that it meant one thing when the couple was twenty, something different when they were forty, and something yet different when they were sixty? When we read didactic literature about how families should behave, what did the author mean by the word? And so on.
There aren't easy answers to these questions. The reader must nevertheless keep them fresh in mind while studying the topic, exercising critical faculties while researching and caution when generalizing.
Family Structures
A rather old stereotype of pre-modern families is that they were "extended" (and, by implication, that modern families are "nuclear"). Using my guide above, you'll know that the reality was more complicated. There were indeed extended families in the usual sense: three generations under a single roof. This was not, however, the only structure; it likely wasn't even the most common.
As with just about every aspect of social history, our sources leave us mostly in the dark. Those we do have raise nearly as many questions as they answer. But let's look into the corners where we can at least see a little.
Age at marriage was a major factor in family structure, and this varied by region. In northwestern Europe, man and wife were pretty close in age, marrying in their early 20s and with the man only two or three years older than the woman. In southern Europe, by contrast, the woman was usually in her late teens while her husband was in his late 20s or early 30s. In eastern Europe, the tendency was for both to be in their teens and for the couple to live in the parental household for quite a long time.
Economic factors appear to be the primary determinant in these variations, but social custom enters in as well. The fundamental variable was whether the new couple was to live on their own or not. If the former, then the man had to have sufficient income to establish an independent household. Varying economic opportunities therefore explain why in some areas the man couldn't marry until older. It should be obvious that this also means that the very broad generalities outlined above will have had numerous local exceptions.
Within these broad outlines were other variations in family structure. One of the more significant is the inclusion of servants and other dependents. It seems odd to us that a family would include strangers as part of the family, but it's really us moderns who are odd; the older practice is very old and spreads across cultures. In the specific case of early modern Europe, we have evidence of the head of household standing in court on behalf of a servant, of servants being included in wills, and of explicit references in literature that include servants.
You should note that I am including people who weren't necessarily employees. Another resident stranger could be an apprentice. This young boy (rarely a girl) might live in the household for years at a time, through the entire adolescent period, though age of apprenticeship varied significantly from one region to another and one trade to another. The master was obliged by contract to do certain things for the apprentice, but given that an apprentice might very well be the son of a relative or the son of a fellow guildsman, it was not at all unnatural to consider the boy "one of the family."
In the broader sense of family, and this is true mainly of cities, the well-to-do had "clients." This word didn't have the modern connotation of "customer"; rather, it meant something closer to "dependent". These were the people who depended on the important man for business, for jobs, for legal protection, for social advantage. They were family in the sense that if the important man feuded with another, then his clientela by definition were also in the feud. This made for no end of something very close to gang fights, as the clients of one man fought with the clients of the other. This sort of penumbra of "family" was restricted to important patricians in the towns.
There was something like this in the countryside, too, among the nobility. Perhaps best known are the all-but-gangs of 15th century England: men kept by "livery and maintenance" which is to say, men who were dressed in the colors of their lord and who were allowed some sort of income. They would fight for their lord, in exchange for which he protected them when they got into legal trouble. The letters of the Paston family have a number of accounts of the actions by men such as this. This scourge was largely broken by King Henry VII, but persisted in other forms all across Europe and right through our era.
Common folk couldn't afford this sort of thing, of course. They were the clients, not the patrons. But this meant that over the course of a lifetime a man might be in multiple families, and this was even more true for a woman. There was one's birth family, the family where one served for six or ten years, the family of one's husband, the family of one's second husband, and at age sixty which of these was "family?" Perhaps all.
When reading about family, then, you might consider the word as signifying not a single entity, but rather a complex web of relationships that was constantly in flux. The famiglia was a flexible notion, rarely explicitly defined and adaptable to the circumstance, yet strong enough to serve as the very bedrock of European society.