This study contends that two suppositions have achieved almost full and unquestioned acceptance in contemporary social history and family studies. The first is that at any given time in any given culture one particular form or model of the family dominates; the second is that historical changes in the family operate in a single and compelling direction. In fact, Joel Rosenthal argues, it is never possible to discuss "the family" as a monolithic entity. In this book, he shows that there was no single structure, no paradigm of family that embraced all men and women in the late Middle Ages. Nor were lives lived just within the framework of a particular structure. Rosenthal demonstrates that any individual, male or female, could - and usually did - live simultaneously within the patriarchal structure, the nuclear family and the horizontal family composed of sprawling and flexible networks of kin. In addition, women who survived childbirth were likely to experience widowhood eventually. This was a third family structure, defined at once by the patriarch and by his absence. Rosenthal examines the variety of the widow's experience, again emphasizing the idea that there was no clearly delineated course to be followed.