The Family in Early Modern England is one of the best-arranged and most useful edited collections I have read in years. It is both a Festschrift for the contributors’ respected mentor Anthony Fletcher and a reflection on the thirtieth anniversary of Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage, 1500–1800. Each author responds to an argument or topic initiated by Stone's work on marriage and the family (and there is so much to which they can respond). At the same time, the contributors show us new directions, methodologies, and evidential possibilities for family history. The editors, Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, provide us with a model of a tightly focused edited collection that stays on point and allows the separate essays to speak to and build on one another. The essays in the collection cover such topics as family participation in crime and rebellion, women's perceptions of the family, marital breakdown, and childlessness. The book is a useful read for anyone interested in the state of the field and would be very suitable for postgraduate classes, which could first read Stone and then this companion volume as a response.

Stone authored two books specifically on marital breakdown and several essays in the volume address this topic. Focusing exclusively on evidence from the ecclesiastical courts, Stone argued that private, legal separations were not available to couples until the 1650s. Tim Stretton's fine essay counters this periodization. Examining other legal jurisdictions, he pushes the periodization back one hundred years, showing that couples were legally separating from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Stretton finds that local magistrates negotiated separation agreements, the common law upheld property and maintenance agreements worked out in separations, and equity courts such as Chancery and Requests heard suits from separated spouses. Examining these court records provides an entirely different picture of “failing marriage” in early modern England. Like Stretton, Bernard Capp shows how a topic looks different depending on the records a scholar consults. While Stone and others have argued that the efforts of the Godly Reformers of the 1650s were ineffective, by examining the recognizances ordered by Middlesex magistrates, Capp finds that local authorities actively attempted to control and “reform” marital and sexual behavior. These authorities used the procedure of binding over individuals for good behavior, with the threat of a fine for an infraction, when dealing with cases of sexual immorality and marital infidelity.

Women's and gender historians have been some of the most vocal critics of Stone's work, and several of the volume's essays continue the work of showing how gender analysis revises Stone's arguments. For example, Stone viewed crime and violence as an example of the breakdown of emotional bonds in early modern society. But Garthine Walker examines how crime not only broke down families but also united them. Linking the histories of crime and of the family, Walker questions how historians of crime assume criminality emerges from the individual, and she argues instead for a focus on the familial context of criminal actions. As she shows, when men poached animals, it was the women of the household who sold the animals or prepared them for the family's dinner. Such an argument also questions the supposition by Stone and others that women engaged in less crime and violence than men. Instead, Walker shows us that in a majority of cases of assault and trespass and damage, men were accompanied by spouses and other kin. Like Walker, John Walter also questions Stone's theory that women were submissive and argues for a familial context for violence and protest. Walter examines the composition of English crowds and protests, noting not only the participation of women and youth but also how protestors manipulated their age and gender identities to enable them to participate in the crowd.

Ingrid Tague's essay on the eighteenth-century aristocratic family also adds gender to the picture, but in addition she reexamines Stone's model of change in the English family over the period 1500–1800. Tague argues that rather than descrying any linear transformation in the family over time, she sees all three of Stone's family types—families based on kinship networks, patriarchal authority, and domestic ideals—active and competing in the aristocracy of the 1700s. Joanne Bailey's essay also reexamines Stone's theory of successive family types, but in her case she focuses on Stone's argument that relations between parents and children became increasingly emotional and affectionate over the early modern period. Bailey says that the historiography has come to a dead end in arguing for or against continuity and change in affective relations between parents and children. Instead, she suggests some new avenues for research for English historians, particularly encouraging them to look at trends in Continental European history and to expand the notion of parenting to include adult child-parent relations and grandparenting.

Not only have historians critiqued Stone's lack of gender analysis, but they have also pointed out the class bias of his research on the family. Steve Hindle's essay provides a nice, succinct review of the historiography on the family life of the poor. Hindle adds to it by examining a new source: petitions to the county JPs to force parish officials to fulfill their relief obligations. The narrative nature of these petitions reveals much incidental detail about family life among the poor, particularly the material and moral support they received from kin. Through a case study of one particularly well-documented family, Hindle posits that kin support was critical for the survival of the poor.

Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, the volume's editors, also contribute an interesting essay on the understudied topic of childless, married men. When childlessness has been studied at all, it has been in relationship to women or failed mothers. Instead, Berry and Foyster examine reproduction's importance to and for men and how much fatherhood “was a constituent element of masculinity” and a man's position as patriarch. Essays such as this one show the new directions of family history, interrogating the varied forms of families, the familial context of masculinity, and men's fraught relationship to patriarchy. The authors’ suggestion that contemporaries may have placed equal blame on husbands for a barren marriage requires further study. And in looking at reasons why men might not have children, the authors also leave out the possibility of homosexuality. But this essay does exactly what a good volume should do; like Lawrence Stone's work, it will hopefully provoke further research.