Marriage and Love in England, 1300 – 1840: Modes of Reproduction

Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 is a history of the intimate lives and aspirations of the English people from medieval to modern times. It is scholarly, provocative, and highly readable.

Alan Macfarlane shows why people married, at what age and with what expectations, as well as the nature of their courtship. He examines their reasons for having children, and the attitudes between the sexes and between generations. He considers how far in all of these respects behaviour varied by class, and how it changed or remained constant over five hundred years. Finally, he asks why the English experience was crucially different from that of other European countries, and why it was the population expanded suddenly to provide a vital resource for the first Industrial Revolution.