The innovative and provocative essays in Framing the Family, are not primarily concerned with recovering the historical past, but rather seek to explore the complex relationship between history and cultural production in relation to the medieval and early modern family. These essays focus on diverse aspects of the family: the conjugal pair, the household, the relationship of parent to child, of the couple to the extended family, and of the nuclear family to the community. In doing so, they make clear the richness and complexity of representations and narratives of the medieval and Early Modern family, whose history is just now being written.