My aim in this pamphlet is to provide a guide for those who wish to explore the burgeoning literature on the history of the Western family since the sixteenth century. Over the past twenty years family history has been one of the main growth areas in the development of social history; indeed, little of the literature discussed in this pamphlet was written before 1960 and most was published after 1970. On the one hand the newness has made family history immensely exciting – so much has had to be discovered and many of the discoveries have been so unexpected. On the other hand there have been difficulties. As in any pioneering discipline some lines of inquiry have proved totally fruitless. The many hours of detailed work necessary to produce results for even a single community have meant that progress has been slow. The fact that most work has been based on single villages or small regions has made it extraordinarily difficult to build up a clear picture of the main changes in family life over the past 400 years. Indeed, as we shall see, there are still major disputes even over which questions should be asked.

Almost inevitably in all this activity, controversy and disagreement between scholars favouring different ways forward have been common; some of the attacks made on other people's research have by normal academic standards been quite abusive, with scholars implying that their opponents' work was either irrelevant or almost totally lacking in scholarly judgement and rigour.