Home, Family, and Childhood opens the door to the most intimate world of medieval life: the household. Beyond castles, wars, and kings, the Middle Ages were shaped every day by marriages, births, childhood, work, inheritance, illness, and the bonds that held families together through periods of extraordinary uncertainty.

Across twelve richly detailed chapters, this book explores how medieval men, women, and children experienced courtship and marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, education and discipline, household authority, service, fosterage, women's labor, inheritance disputes, old age, death, widowhood, and orphanhood. From the cramped cottage of a peasant family to the ordered chambers of merchants, nobles, and royal courts, it reveals how dramatically family life differed across the medieval social order while remaining rooted in the same fundamental need for cooperation and survival.

Drawing attention to the people often overlooked by traditional histories, Home, Family, and Childhood presents medieval families not as distant or emotionless figures, but as recognizable human beings who loved, argued, worked, worried about their children, mourned their dead, and struggled to build secure futures in an unpredictable world. It is an intimate portrait of the relationships that quietly sustained medieval society from one generation to the next.