In this exceptional piece of social history Steven Ozment sifts through private papers and public archives to analyse and weave together fascinating primary documents relating to five German families in the early 16th and 17th Centuries. This penetrating look at the family circle provides a rounded and insightful portrait of an age and of a people. In a captivating narrative by an author hailed as 'scholarly, immpecable yet at the same time perfectly accesible to general readers' (Booklist) we find the struggles, failures and successes of the family of the past bear striking resemblances to our own.