Historians understand that in the midst of “fighting the good fight” for history, in which we are often confronted with unequal forces, one finds, almost inevitably, the impulse to desert, to flee, to disappear. This impulse to give up, to abandon the eventual encounter with the past, is more or less hidden in the composition of a type of account of the familiar, inscribed in the reconstruction of the traces of the mentality of an era.
Many years after having been initiated into the field of Latin American family history by the pioneering works of Asunción Lavrín and the impulse of the Journal of Family History, edited by Tamara Hareven, attempts to explain this resistant social organization now demonstrate a certain tiredness. Today there are few theoretical innovations within a collective social subject constructed by means of structures, intimacy, and imagination. Escenas de la vida conyugal is a late arrival...
