| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800. By Raffaella Sarti. Translated by Allan Cameron. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, hardback 2002, paperback 2004. xi plus 324 pp. hardback, $35; paperback, $18).
The original, Italian version of this outstanding survey of early modern European domestic life and its participants' housing, food, and clothing had an appropriately explicit title: Vita di case: Abitare, mangiare, vestire nell'Europa moderna (1999). The English title mistakenly emphasizes a homogeneous entity ("Europe") in reference to an anachronistically loaded term ("home"), an imprecise concept ("family"), and an anodyne topical identification ("material culture").	1
Sarti's book scrupulously avoids such normalizing, either topically or geographically. Whatever the topic being discussed, she is careful to frame her conclusions with terms and phrases of tentativeness, such as "deconstruction" (14), "plurality and diversity" (25), "neither altogether crystalline" (35), "somewhat nebulous scene" (41), and "variety and richness of the alternatives" (85). The refrain is "difference": "the main purpose of this book will be to establish the differences between the lifestyles of people living in different regions and different social groups within Europe's cultural borders" (4). Those borders are permeable enough to admit Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Sàmi, inter alia.	2
The discussion of domestic life cleverly begins by considering the conditions of home lessness, whether from destitution, such as beggars, or from livelihood, such as charcoal burners. It then surveys the widely various ways in which people formed households and legitimated marriages. Sarti's own research has concentrated on servants in early modern Italian households, so she must have a certain satisfaction in showing that, from antiquity well into the early modern era, familia and its multi-lingual cognates (the term permeated European language groups, whether Celtic, Germanic, Romance, or Slavic) referred to people liable to the authority of a paterfamilias. Historically, "dependency and not a shared roof" (32) put someone in a family; "families" as lineages and reproductive couples were relatively modern qualifications of fundamental relations of dependence.	. . .

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