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Mikolaj Szoltysek , Rethinking East-Central Europe: family systems and co-residence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Volume 1: Contexts and analyses and Volume 2: Data quality assessments, documentation and bibliography (Bern : Peter Lang , 2015). Pages xxx + 1066, including figures 130 + tables 83 + maps 7. £107 paperback and ebook.
Within the fields of historical demography and family history, a dichotomy has been drawn between western and eastern European marriage patterns and family systems. Expansive discourse on this subject goes back to Malthus, and was further developed by Le Play, Laslett and Hajnal, among others. The last of these drew a conceptual line from present-day St Petersburg in Russia to Trieste in Italy and, based on extant statistical evidence, surmised that people who lived west of this line married late, with a considerable share of the population remaining single for life. East of the line, and elsewhere globally, early marriage was universal.
Hajnal believed that the (western) European marriage pattern, thus defined, had existed for at least the two centuries preceding the Second World War. According to him, the difference in the western and eastern European marriage patterns resulted from different family formation systems. In western Europe, the children of a married couple were supposed to leave the parental home and to form their own household. This form of neo-locality in a nuclear family system required economic independence, which the majority of the population acquired only at an advanced stage in the life course, while for others it was unattainable. East of the Hajnal line, economic independence was no requirement...