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Medieval Society

Family

Surely this can't be very complicated, right? Everyone knows what a family is.

If you go on to study social history, you will find that it is precisely the things that "everyone knows" that turn out to be the places where "everyone" is mostly wrong. So it is with what constituted a family.

Historians (well, this historian, at least) like to begin with the words themselves. In this case, the word is the Latin familias. Happily, we have quite a bit of literature from ancient times on the topic of family, and there's good evidence that the definition didn't shift around a whole lot going into the Middle Ages.

In general, familias meant more than just Dad, Mom and kids. The exact boundaries were blurry, flexible, but they typically included servants (if any) and kin out to an ill-defined extent. This last is not too far from the modern sense. We say "family" in one context and it's clear we mean Dad, Mom and kids. We say "family" in a different context and we mean to include aunts, uncles, cousins, and more, as in "family reunion". We typically welcome a son- or daughter-in-law into "the family", even though when over at the other house, it's the other spouse being welcomed into that family. So who's in whose family?

Medieval society had all those intersections, plus more.