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The post-World War II development of kinship history was initiated by the emergence of methods for the analysis of quantitative historical-demographic sources: in France by means of the Family Reconstitution Method based on genealogical records and parish registers; in England by the analysis of nominative household censuses. The essay discusses five areas of subsequent development in the field : (1) the search for an investigation of large-scale kinship structures, and their influence on society as a whole; (2) life-course analysis, which integrates both events in individual life histories and larger historical events with the household developmental cycle;(3) interactions between kinship and economic relations, and particularly the roles played by women in the economic life of the family; (4) the effects of kinship on social relations at the community level; and (5) the relationships between kinship and social structures more generally. In this last respect, the essay emphasizes the influence of the particularly French intellectual institutions and traditions, and of the alliance theory of marriage on the distinctive direction taken by French social historians. Finally, the essay considers the study of mentalités, as it has influenced kinship history.

This article surveys representations of kin in trans-alpine Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, with particular attention to the Netherlands and Germany. In the Middle Ages most such images occurred in a religious context where kin appeared in funeral monuments or as donors in devotional images. In the sixteenth century kin images were transformed under the influence of Erasmian Christian humanism and Protestantism into apparently secular portraits Interpreted on a symbolic level, however, they reflect the set of values that kinship ideally supported: the family as an institution, sustaining the moral, spiritual, and material well-being of its members from generation to generation. The symbolic expression of these values shifted from a basically religious idiom in the sixteenth century to a naturalistic one in the eighteenth. The changing treatment of dead members of the family is considered in this light.

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