Renaissance ways of thinking… what were their beliefs/values in regards to marriage, love and family?
While it is true that, as the comment above says, economics played a part in marriage, it was assumed that a couple should have a reasonable liking for each other. And there certainly were love matches. As Alison Plowden observes in Elizabethen England ‘nobody had any objections to love so long as the price was right’. In other words, so long as the person you fell in love with was from a family of a similar economic status to your own. Marriage was very much a partnership in those days, albeit with the man as the senior partner. The majority of people still lived by farming, and a man needed a wife to help run his farm. While he took care of the fieldwork, she would look after the poultry, milk the cows, make her own butter and cheese, brew the ale that most people drank instead of water, preserve food, cook, and often would help out in the fields at busy times, harvest etc. If the man had a trade or business, his wife would often participate in the family trade, whatever it might be
