Until the mid-twentieth century, professional historians often ignored the details of everyday life as antiquarian, in the sense of mundane, instead concentrating their narrative efforts on the wars and machinations of the powerful. The new legitimacy of the study of daily life derives from the growing concern with social history, beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, with its focus on mentalities, social classes, and ideas. This outlook argues that continuity and evolution are more significant than dramatic events like wars and dynastic upheaval, and asserts the validity of the study of, literally, the mundane—conditions of material life, and modes of work and play, for instance.
A major step was the publication in 1977 of Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, which argued that the early modern era saw the traditional extended family evolve into a recognizably modern nuclear family of individuals connected by affect. Beginning in the 1970s, the use of the computer to compile, organize, and sort large amounts of data enabled historians to detect subtle changes and long-term continuities. In their influential work Tuscans and Their Families, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber digitized the wealth of detail in the 1427 catasto ('tax census') of Florence, which described the wealth, ages, size, and composition of families. The recent boom in women's and gender history has also contributed to the study of daily life by demanding the inclusion in the story of all members of society, not only prominent males.
Also vital to understanding this topic are the material conditions of life: what people ate, the diseases that sickened them, their sexual habits, how they worked, where and under what conditions they lived, their manners, even changes in their size. Although the material conditions of daily life varied according to factors like social class and geography, Europeans also shared commonalities, like exposure to diseases and, with the exception of the Jews, Christianity. Life in this era remained dependent on farming; not until the industrial revolution's agricultural surpluses and paid work in factories would the urban population boom. This new historical focus is documenting the economic, religious, and even climatic factors that influenced the evolution of daily life in early modern Europe.
Family Life
An understanding of daily life in early modern Europe begins with the family. Recent research has revised the thesis of Philippe Ariès, who maintained that parents did not bond with their children because of high child mortality rates; both art, like Agnolo Bronzino's sensitive portrait (c. 1549) of Giovanni de' Medici as a baby, and documents reveal the deep love parents felt even for infants and their appreciation of childhood as a separate, formative stage of life.
While maintaining that marriage is licit and intended (by the Christian deity) for procreation, the Catholic Church upheld the superiority of celibacy. A licit marriage was one undertaken freely by the two parties, although males continued to arrange marriages for dependent females. Most marriages included a dowry, often payable on consummation of the union. The Protestant Reformation, however, wrought a dramatic change. Martin Luther (1483–1546) declared that hardly one woman in ten thousand could keep a vow of celibacy, and that marriage and parenthood were the wholesome, divinely ordained destiny of human beings. He also urged women to become pregnant as often as possible, for doing so fulfilled God's will. Intercourse between spouses, therefore, was a spiritual duty, and Luther recommended it twice a week. Failure to produce offspring could lead to suspicion of witchcraft or vicious ridicule of the husband's lack of sexual prowess, and, in Catholic areas, be considered grounds for annulment.
Spouses were supposed to remain faithful. For males, however, this ideal was often honored in the breach: in Protestant Zurich, about 40 percent of divorce suits claimed that the husband had been unfaithful. Zurich retained its brothel, while Catholic Florence registered prostitutes. Male-male sexual activity was common in late Renaissance Florence despite anti-sodomy laws.
Advice literature stressed careful household management and childrearing, Protestant handbooks likened the father to God, lovingly correcting his wife and children, setting an example through his own disciplined life, and supporting the household. The good wife counseled her husband when asked, obeyed him, and oversaw the household with wisdom and thrift. Handbooks frequently admonished husbands not to mistreat their wives and children. This wholesome Christian family was to mirror the wholesome state, in which the monarch ruled his people as a loving father ruled his family.
Fathers hoped for sons. The sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) related that his mother, having borne a girl after several miscarriages, believed that her next pregnancy signaled another girl. When the newborn proved to be male, the ecstatic father named him Benvenuto ('welcome'), for his sex was a delightful surprise. The writer Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), however, reported that, although he had wished for a son, his infant daughter had filled him with tenderness and love at first sight. Still, adult reminiscences of beatings by parents or schoolmasters indicate the frequency of harsh discipline.
The middle and upper classes tended to seek wet nurses for infants, despite the high rate of mortality from this practice and exhortations to mothers from advice manuals to nurse their own children. The recourse to wet nurses may have resulted from the sexual demands of husbands, for intercourse was believed to ruin a mother's milk; canon law called for new parents to remain celibate during nursing.
Food, Diet, and Health
The German saying "Der Mensch ist was er isst" ('a man is what he eats') was a social truth, for the prosperous could be recognized by their regular consumption of meat. Still, early modern Europeans generally consumed more meat than their contemporaries elsewhere. Economic and demographic change, however, meant less meat during the seventeenth century; in one French town, the number of butchers declined from eighteen in 1550 to two in 1660 to one a century later. Not until the industrial revolution did the meat consumption of average Europeans increase. The poor appear to have been increasingly prevented from hunting, as the aristocracy made game preserves off-limits to all but themselves, yet the growing exploitation of the fishing banks off North America gave Europeans a plentiful, cheap source of protein.
Vegetable foods, including grains, were the staff of daily life for Europeans. Only in Ireland and parts of Germany did the American potato become a significant foodstuff. Maize was cultivated as early as the sixteenth century, but made its way to the Danube only in the nineteenth. Guild rules governed the quality, weight, and ingredients of bread, but ample evidence shows frequent evasion of these regulations. Individuals also baked bread, but pressure from bakers led to attempts, as in Geneva in 1673, to forbid the practice. The poor ate darker, coarse bread, while consumption of white bread signaled a prosperous household. The social distinction was not lost in Florence, where a charity offered symbolic white bread to its clientele, the "shamed poor"—innocent paupers willing, but unable, to earn their livelihood.
Hard alcohol was used mostly for medicinal purposes until the eighteenth century, but wine was a staple in Europe, even more so than in the present: in the early seventeenth century, for instance, Germans cultivated four times today's vinifera acreage. The addition of brandy to Portuguese wines during fermentation allowed for more stability during shipping, and slaked the English thirst for sweet wines at a time when the crown imposed high taxes on imported French wines. Connoisseurship emerged, with one sixteenth-century Tuscan oenophile identifying the best vineyards and varietals. The grand dukes of Tuscany attempted to ensure quality by regulating the grape harvest. To stave off drunkenness among youths, they cracked down on taverns. The growing use of hops increased the popularity of beer, especially in non-wine-growing areas.
Products from Asia and the Americas changed everyday life. Coffee and tea became fashionable in the seventeenth century; the scientist, diplomat, and epicure Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712) suggested drinking coffee as an aid to health, digestion, and wakefulness. The first coffeehouse in London dates to 1650, and such establishments soon became so popular as places to exchange news and gossip that a royal attempt in 1675 to close them came to nothing. Chocolate, too, won favor, and was made into a hot, sweetened drink (Magalotti collected a recipe on his travels). Tobacco, brought back from the Americas by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), was at first a botanical and medicinal curiosity. By the late sixteenth century, it was cultivated in Spain, Italy, the Balkans, and elsewhere in response to the European demand to chew, smoke, and sniff it. England attempted to prohibit its use in 1604, but in vain; governments taxed it instead.
The seventeenth century witnessed several wars and a "little ice age," resulting in poor harvests. According to a Tuscan report of 1767, of the previous 316 years there had been 111 years of dearth and only sixteen of bounty. The abbess of the French convent of Port-Royal wrote in 1649 that marauding soldiers had seized the crops, refusing to give anything to the locals. A 1651 account of St. Quentin, Normandy, claimed that the starving inhabitants had little to eat other than mice, roots, and bread made from straw and earth.
Early modern governments felt both concern for and fear of the poor. Begging, supplemented by occasional work, theft, pawning, and alms, formed part of a strategy of day-to-day survival for the lowest classes. Complaints proliferated about wandering, masterless men whose numbers increased as landlords enclosed formerly common land. An English law, drafted in 1536, complained that the able-bodied begged instead of working, depriving the honest, deserving poor of alms. Bavaria, among other areas of Europe, granted begging licenses only to inhabitants; outsiders were arrested or driven away.
Health, Disease, and Medicine
Recent research has shown that the average adult male in seventeenth-century France was short—under 5 feet, 4 inches (about 1,617 mm). The same study proved a strong correlation between average height and quality and quantity of harvest, and showed a trend to greater height with the waning of the "little ice age." Social class correlated with height: the sons of cloth workers were about 1.4 inches (36 mm) shorter, on average, than the sons of the upper classes. Class also helped determine lifespan. While between 30 and 50 percent of children died before age five, 70 percent of children of the ruling classes survived to age fifteen in the sixteenth century, a much better ratio than for the lower classes. Aside from plague, malaria, measles, smallpox, and the like, children suffered from worms, infections, dysentery, and other ailments. They learned about mortality early, both from the diseases that struck them and their relatives and from public executions.
Diseases, including smallpox, ravaged early modern Europe, but none was more feared than the plague. Not until the late seventeenth century did its threat recede. Some cities in northern Italy created health boards charged with detecting outbreaks of plague, issuing health passports, and preventing the disease's spread. In sixteenth-century Tuscany, the Medici dukes attempted to ensure the availability of physicians and pharmacists even in remote areas.
Written and archaeological evidence suggests that Columbus's sailors introduced syphilis from the Americas to the unexposed population of Europe. A 1496 woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) depicted the gruesome, shocking symptoms. Two years later, a Viennese illustration hinted at the cause of infection by showing a naked couple, pocked with sores, being treated in a bedroom. Contemporary accounts described a rapid, horrifying progression of disfiguring lesions, madness, and death. Likely victims of syphilis included Henry VIII of England (ruled 1509–1547), Charles VIII (ruled 1483–1498) and Francis I (ruled 1515–1547) of France, and Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503).
Though the sick who could afford it consulted physicians, a leading British physician of the late eighteenth century complained that almost nothing was known of the nature and prevention of contagion. The first defense against a contagious disease arrived in the late eighteenth century with Edward Jenner's vaccinations—met with great skepticism—against smallpox. Some herbal remedies, like digitalis, from the foxglove plant, were effective, but others ranged from ineffective to dangerous.
Few of the sick sought care in hospitals, which treated the indigent. The Spedale degli Innocenti ('foundling hospital') of Florence enjoyed a lower mortality rate in the sixteenth century than some Parisian hospitals in the eighteenth. In 1776, Brussels, with 70,000 inhabitants, had only one hospital with seventy-seven beds; Antwerp, with 50,000 people and ninety-six beds, fared little better. Massive migration to the cities beginning in the mid-eighteenth century led to a worsening of living conditions and invited the spread of disease.
Personal hygiene varied widely. In some parts of Europe, curative baths were popular. Magalotti suggested cleaning the teeth with a paste containing spices and then rinsing with wine. The ricordi ('family memoirs and accounts') of one Florentine of the late sixteenth century included regular payments to barbers for haircuts, shaves, and shampoos. Other ricordi list the considerable expenses incurred in purchasing drugs to treat illnesses.
Education and Civility
By the sixteenth century, the middle class sought larger living quarters and more privacy, and had adopted good manners to distinguish itself socially from those beneath it. The humanist Desiderius Erasmus's (c. 1466?–1536) best-seller, On Civility in Children, taught the young that those who seized the choicest morsels from the common dish and overate behaved like peasants. Table cutlery grew in popularity, and middle-class Italians had begun to use forks by the late fifteenth century. Not until the next century did the rest of Europe embrace them: the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1558) owned only a dozen.
The importance of good manners in climbing the social ladder reached its zenith at the court of Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715). There, nobles vied for the opportunity to be present at the king's rising and retiring each day. They learned that, to win the attention of the monarch and to rise above their peers, they had to master a byzantine etiquette that included bowing to the king's dinner as it was carried past. Still, merchants' manners and aspirations to nobility were bitingly parodied in the playwright Molière's (1622–1673) Self-Made Gentleman (Le bourgeois gentilhomme).
Some 25 percent of Florentine boys may have acquired basic literacy in the fifteenth century. Vittorino da Feltre's (1397–1446) school in Mantua accepted boys and girls, children of the nobility, and poor scholarship students. In general, however, education of girls aimed at instilling virtue and rudimentary literacy; embroidery and needlecraft taught them discipline and patience. Of course, the daughters of the upper classes often received a much better education from some of the outstanding teachers of the day. Education included religious instruction, with children memorizing their catechisms' questions and answers.
The Economy and Daily Life
In general, prices rose steadily over the course of the sixteenth century, apparently the result of the devaluation of silver currency. In 1540, for instance, Henry VIII of England took the silver shillings that he had collected in taxes, melted them down, mixed them with copper, and returned many more of these now-debased shillings to circulation. But rising prices also created opportunities for peasants with surplus crops, landowners who took in-kind rents, and some shopkeepers and merchants.
By the late sixteenth century, guilds controlled matriculation and standards in most skilled trades and professions, though their attempts to prevent the exodus of skilled workers—symptomatic of their waning power—crumbled before the prospect of higher wages elsewhere. In Rouen, they managed to prohibit the manufacture of a cheap cloth designed to compete with silk. In response, merchant-entrepreneurs simply moved production to the countryside, installing looms in peasants' cottages. Weaving cloth in the putting-out system, in which workers received wages per piece, offered country dwellers a source of cash income, which led to changes in buying habits and in consumer demand. The impact of international trade can be seen in northern still-life paintings, which, by the mid-sixteenth century, depicted such novelties as turkeys and North Atlantic lobsters. The 1640s witnessed the tulip mania in Holland, one of the first Western consumer fads.
Bibliography
Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. New York, 1973. Originally published as Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (1967); a sweeping, classic study of the material conditions of life throughout the world over the long term.
Chartier, Roger, ed. Passions of the Renaissance, Vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987–1991. Originally published as Histoire de la vie privée (1986); investigates changes in private life, including the increased desire for private space.
Elias, Norbert. History of Manners: The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York, 1978. Originally published as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939); traces the growing concern with manners from the medieval through the early modern era.
Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, 1985. Abridged from Les Toscans et leurs familles: Une étude du "catasto" florentin de 1427 (Paris, 1978). Quantitative study of the famous Florentine tax census; the raw data that Herlihy and Klapisch compiled may be viewed at http://jamestown.services.brown.edu/projects/catasto/overview.html
Kertzer, David I., and Marzio Barbagli, eds. Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789. Vol. 1 of The History of the European Family. New Haven, 2001.
Komlos, John, in collaboration with Michel Hau and Nicolas Bourguinat. "The Anthropometric History of Early-Modern France." Available on-line: www.eh.net/XIIICongress/cd/papers/70Bourguinat Hau Komlos385.pdf. A study of men in early modern France based on quantitative analysis of military records.
Ozment, Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, Mass, 1983. Argues that love and affection characterized the Reformation family; offers detailed insight regarding family life.
Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York, 1996. Based on a study of police records; argues that male–male sex was part of male identity and maturation in the hub of Renaissance culture.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York, 1977. Abridged edition, 1979. Important study of the evolution of modern family life.
—CAROL M. BRESNAHAN
