The historical study of the family has been fraught with difficulties, not least because many records are more informative of what people in the past thought the family should be, rather than giving us much information on how families were actually constituted or reporting the experience of family life. The fact, too, that everyone at some time lives in a family and that many of its features seem timeless, rooted in biology, makes it perplexing to grasp the great diversity of families over time.

Yet even the definition of who was part of the family has changed radically. At the beginning of the period, the family was often still conceived as a group of dependants: wife, children, lesser kin, servants and apprentices attached to the household of the masculine head, usually the master/husband/father. The male principal had only recently come to be regarded as part of that family unit. In political thought, theology and the common sense of daily life, this conception of the family was the template for most other organisations and was seen as the foundation of society.

Numerous recent studies have thrown some light on the many variations in the lived experience of individuals in families, kinship networks and households. The problem is, however, that, like a torch turned on particular items in a darkened but crowded room, such research can only illuminate what is caught in its beam, leaving the general picture still obscure.