The history of great men & events is familiar to every schoolchild but the facts of everyday life in bygone eras remain a mystery. Now Barbara Hanawalt has lifted the curtain on "the dark ages" & has provided an intimate view that seems familiar & yet at odds with what many experts have told us. For the thesis of this book is that the biological needs served by the family have never changed & the way 14th-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for both the newborn & the aged, controlling premarital sex & alleviating the harshness of their material environment wasn't altogether unlike our 20th-century solutions. Using a variety of medieval sources, notably over 3000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, she emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period & explores the reasons for such families being the basic unit of society & the economy. The book abounds in fascinating detail, here citing an incantation against rats, there noting the hierarchy of bread consumption ("our modern supermarket bread could be seen as the ultimate fulfillment of the peasants' dream of white bread"), or the games people played. The book makes abundantly clear that what we popularly think of as the dark ages are really filled with sunlight as well as shadows & with the doings of ordinary people who must get on with the business of living & find some joy in it.
Barbara A. Hanawalt is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University & author of Crime & Conflict in English Communities, 1300-48.