CEURFAMFORM · Astride's of Hajnal line: central and the geography of family forms, 17th - 19th centuries
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2005-12-01 → 2007-11-30
- EU contribution
- €152,809
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- EIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - CEURFAMFORM (Astride's of Hajnal line: Central and the geography of family forms, 17th - 19th centuries)
The project investigated the patterns of family and household formation among peasant societies of East-Central Europe at the end of 18th century. Within the framework of the Marie Curie scholarship a dark spot in the history of European family structures has been opened. This is so because the project explored one of the largest collections of historical household data in Europe on preindustrial rural settings, it transformed this data into usable historical information that will have wide currency, and applied a variety of methodologies in its analysis to reveal various aspects of family systems, as well as their spatial distribution. Through this, the project made an original contribution to our understanding of family structures in Eastern Europe, in particular, by challenging long-standing generalisations and assumptions about the nature of family life in this region in the past. The results indicate that the existing models of household systems in preindustrial Europe are far too rigid to meet the diversity of residential patterns of the Eastern European serfs. In this regard, for example, it has been revealed that historical family structures in this area displayed elements of Central European, Russian, and Balkan family structures, but in a unique constellation and composition.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The debate on the allegedly unique European family system has been obsessed with distinguishing between the area of the Northwest- European pattern and other zones. John Hajnal proposed a demarcation line running right through Central Europe and dividing t he continent into two zones of sharply contrasted family systems. Also, Peter Laslett from the Cambridge Group tentatively divided Europe into four broad geographical zones, each with its peculiar family system. In all these debates place of Central Europe was ambiguous and Janus-faced. In fact, these continent-wide typologies were never concerned overmuch with describing precisely where the 'west' ended and where the 'east' began and they were based on few and scattered data not including any sources from Poland. The principal goal of this project is to reassess the picture of Central European family patterns in (all-) European setting.This implies dealing with the issues whether there was a borderline distinguishing Central European family patterns and marriage behaviours in the past from those considered by Hajnal as 'unique', and if so, where this frontier was located, what the distinguishing features were. The main goal of this project is to investigate household structures and marriage behaviours for several local communities from different parts of Poland and Silesia in 18th and 19th centuries. I am also going to make inter-regional comparison of Polish/Silesian data with the findings for other Central European regions, and finally with research results available for Eastern, Northwestern and Southern Europe.I also want to take hypotheses of borderlines like the one suggested by John Hajnal as subjects of historical research: Where and when, and in which contexts, were such borderlines, dividing 'Central Europe' from the 'West' hypothesised. The main contribution of the research proposal to advance the state-of-art within the project's field concerns its potential for general refinement.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- University of Cambridge · CambridgeCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union