The discipline of family history has grown so rapidly in recent years that inevitably it has come to suffer from a certain lack of comparability and methodology. The earliest studies in the present generation of writing were on the grand scale, outlines of family systems applying to half or more of the European continent. Later the thematic approach, descriptions of families within economic, cultural, or legal systems, and the local study came to be favoured. Family history lends itself particularly well to the latter, since it is easier at this level to set out the social, economic, and cultural influences on family patterns. Nevertheless, other approaches retain their validity, not only to guard us against the atypical case study but to focus attention on key concepts such as the family as work group, concepts which are all too easily lost sight of when sifting through the detail of a particular community study.

The individual contributions to the present volume reflect this division in the literature, some being particular, some general or thematic; indeed, they have been selected to illustrate both the range of approach to, and the variations in, European social structure of past times. Inevitably, a work of this sort could not go forward without a great deal of collaboration among the various contributors, and I am grateful to them and to others for responding so fully to points that have been raised during the editorial process.