Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe: Historical Essays, 1978-1991

Until his untimely death in February 1991, David Herlihy, Professor of History at Brown University, was one of the most prolific and best-known American historians of the European Middle Ages. The author of many books on the history of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy, Herlithy is best known for his 1978 work, Tuscans et leurs familles.

For the last dozen or so years of his life, he launched a series of ambitious projects on the history of women, family, and the collective behavior of social groups in medieval Europe. Despite his completion of two important books on the family and womens work, at the time of his death he had not had time to bring these projects to conclusion.

This volume contains essays he wrote after 1978. They convey a sense of the enormous intellectual energy and great erudition that characterized David Herlihys scholarly career. They also chart a remarkable historians intellectual trajectory, as he searched for new and better ways of asking a set of simple and basic questions about the history of the familythe institution in which the majority of Europeans spent much of their lives.