ABSTRACT
The family has long been located as a key site in the intersection of emotion with economics. If liberal economic theory was haunted by emotions that disrupted its rational – and implicitly unfeeling – modelling, it was the individual’s emotional engagement with, and as part of, families that frequently troubled theoretical assumptions and demanded alternative explanations for human behaviour. 1 This was a dynamic even more pressing for economic historians due to the central role the family-household played in the economy of the medieval and early modern world. Here the household was not a space of consumption situated beyond the productive world (if it ever was), but the location of work, of management, of financial negotiation and decision-making. 2 In many, perhaps most, times and places in medieval and early modern Europe, the family was the heart of the productive enterprise, with the household functioning as the basic unit of economic life. Understanding economy therefore required understanding the operation of families, where emotion might play no small part.
