For the thesis of this book is that the biological needs served by the family have never changed and the way fourteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for both the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment was not altogether unlike our twentieth-century solutions. Now Barbara Hanawalt has lifted the curtain on "the dark ages" and has provided an intimate view that seems surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. The history of great men and events is familiar to every schoolchild but the facts of everyday life in bygone eras remain a tantalizing mystery.
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