Since the publication of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood in the early 1960’s,
historians of the family have been intrigued by the prospect of a history of change in
familial sentiment. 1 Aries’ study of attitudes about children from the Middle Ages to
the eighteenth century, based primarily on art and material evidence, demonstrates
powerfully to historians that we can no longer merely assume the existence of parental
love: human emotion is not an historical constant.2 While Aries did not explicitly
address marital affection, the implications of his study are not lost on historians
interested principally in the study of marriage and marital relations. Today, almost
forty years later, Aries’ research remains the touchstone for historians’ debates centred
on the study of medieval families. In part, the inability of historians to reject altogether
his findings reflects the nature of the study: a couple’S behaviour towards each other
belongs to the inner workings of the home, a sphere of life from which few written
records would ever have been created, let alone have survived.