Ozment's five chapters illuminate the life cycle of the family from its origins in courtship and marriage to the sending forth of a new adult generation. Each of the five families--one clerical and four merchant--document the inner life of the urban family during at least one stage of the cycle. All of the featured families are well-to-do citizens of Nürnberg, one of Europe's great merchant and intellectual cities of the time.

A professor of history at Harvard University, Ozment firmly commands his subject matter and convincingly weaves familial history with the social, economic, political, religious, and cultural history of the times. Although his detailed historical excursions frequently interrupt the flow of the personal narrative, the context they provide enhances the reader's understanding of both personal and societal histories. For example, his discussion of courtship and marriage encompasses high-society gossip, the coronation of a new emperor, contemporary response to the Protestant Reformation, as well as attitudes toward chastity, inheritance, and arranged marriages. Flesh and Spirit provides a fascinating look at both 16th-century Nürnberg and the private lives of its citizens. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack

This graceful book restores humanity to the Reformation family and to family history.

An elegant summa on family life in Europe past, this compact and powerful book extends and completes a project begun with Steven Ozment's When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Harvard). Here Ozment, the leading historian of the family in the middle centuries, replaces the often miserable depiction of premodern family relations with a delicately nuanced portrait of a vibrant and loving social group. Mining the records of families' private lives--from diaries and letters to fiction and woodcuts--Ozment shows us a preindustrial family not very different from the later family of high industry that is generally viewed as the precursor to the sentimental nuclear family of today.

In Ancestors, we see the familiar pattern of a domestic wife and working father in a home in which spousal and parental love were amply present: parents cherished their children, wives were helpmeets in providing for the family, and the genders were nearly equal. Contrary to the abstractions of history, parents then--as now--were sensitive to the emotional and psychological needs of their children, treated them with affection, and gave them a secure early life and caring preparation for adulthood.

As it recasts familial history, Ancestors resonates beyond its time, revealing how much the story of the premodern family has to say to a modern society that finds itself in the throes of a family crisis.