Randolph Trumbach's book, The Rise ogthe Egalitarian Family has to be placed within the developing area of family history. It is in part an argument with some of the doyens of that disciplineLawrence Stone and Edward Shorter on the one hand and Peter Laslett on the other. Trumbach is arguing that what he calls the continuing success of the aristocracy in a revolutionary age 'was due in large part to their internalizing in their domestic relations at the earliest possible moment the morality of the revolutions of the modern age'. He suggests that the first group in English society to adopt the idea that close relations between husband and wife and between parents and children were important were the aristocracy and that this happened in the eighteenth century. Stone also suggests this scenario but Trumbach disagrees with him as to the cause since Stone stresses the political changes taking place while Trumbach emphasizes, though in a very general way, the changes generated by the commercialization of the economy. The weakness of the explanation for the rise of domesticity does seem to be a major problem in the book. Changes in particular families are pinpointed very clearlyin relation to breast-feeding for example but there is no satisfactory account of the reasons for those changes. While Trumbach gives great weight to the doctors, the discussion of the religious influence on domesticity is minimial, which, given the importance of Puritan notions of the family in the seventeenth century of Evangelical ideas in the
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