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of torture in the Renaissance would have to be withdrawn, since
even today it is widely used and thought by many to be at times legit–
imate.
Ozment's attempts at philosophizing about our moral judg–
ments of the past are surprisingly weak. Perhaps he himself does not
take these musings very seriously. What Ozment is really sure about
is that people - men, women, and children -led happy, productive,
caring, and affectionate lives under patriarchy, which were superior,
all in all, to "modern" lives because
their
private lives had a public
point. Ozment is not troubled that families are private, that is, that
families keep their lives to some degree from public view, but he
does object to their having a primarily private purpose, the pleasure
and happiness of those who belong to them. The belief in the natur–
ally public function of the family was already well-developed in the
Classical Greek and Roman world and was a staple of Renaissance
and Reformation social theory.
It
is true that modern individualism
has distinctly weakened this conception of the family, and Ozment's
misgivings are understandable.
The contemporary, and public, interest in the sexual happiness
of marriages is an expression of this individualism, as is contem–
porary historians' concern over the happiness or misery provided by
the intimate side of marriage in past eras. Rose's espousal of the need
for private fictions and Gay's belief that privacy was a defense
against the public order illustrate the current belief that families and
marriages must protect themselves from the larger community - but
this belief may give way to the even more individualistic conviction
that the public world, in particular the state, should serve the fam–
ily and the married couple, rather than the other way around. Of
course, individualism need not altogether reject the idea that family
and privacy have a public function, as John Stuart Mill's well-known
argument for the social benefits of privacy illustrates. Nor must the
older belief in the primarily public function of the family exclude the
conviction that the family provides private benefits to its members.
Ozment therefore objects to a defender of modernity like Lawrence
Stone, who sees the affectionate family as an institution which only
attained cultural dominance within the rise of eighteenth-century in–
dividualism. My own research in sixteenth and seventeenth-century
Puritanism leads me to agree with Ozment's contention that the call
for affection between husband and wife is by no means intrinsic to
individualism.
It
is alive in the Christian humanism of Erasmus,
Colet, and More, and seventeenth-century Puritans took the affec-
