Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete

According to Aristotle, the household was one of the constituent parts of the state. He defined the household in its complete form as consisting of slaves and freemen. Within the household he discerned three primary relationships: those between master and slave, husband and wife, and father and child.' Essential to Aristotle's definition of the household is the inclusion of kin and nonkin members, a circumstance that persisted well into the modern period. Yet medieval social historians have for the most part ignored nonkin members of households, and histories of the family and of households have concentrated almost exclusively on family members. Some of the sources encourage this emphasis. One example is the abundant tax records and census figures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notably in Florence but also in other Italian and Provencal towns. Historians working with those sources often use the word "household" as a synonym for "family" or "clan." When David Herlihy refers to the hearth or the household, he means the family members.2 Richard Goldthwaite's description of the family as "a small group" takes into account only those related by blood or marriage living in one household.3 F. W. Kent, in his study of three Florentine families, declares, "Here a household is understood to be a group of kinsmen living in the same house or in several houses which, in the manner of the time, were joined together to form in effect one dwelling. . ..4 The practice of defining the household as a group of coresident kin persists even when the sources offer material relevant to household members who were not related by blood or marriage.5 The best of these sources is the rich fund of late-medieval notarial records, which have yet to be exploited as they could be to develop a broader conception of people's intimate, domestic space. House