Marriages were made between rich people and aristocrats. Common people lived mainly in informal relationships.
There is no good example of a book popularizing the history of Sèvres, but it is certainly possible to find reliably written and insightful items from the shapeless, colorless mass of various compendiums with flashy titles. Consider: “The Middle Ages in Numbers,” by Kamil Janicki.
At first glance, Janicki’s idea seems somewhat provocative. Is it possible to engage the reader with a narrative taken directly from the statistical yearbook? My answer is: it is possible. And this is often a much more interesting narrative than typical stories about great figures in politics and art at historical crossroads. Behind this lies the belief – drawn from the achievements of economic and sociological historiography – that the approximate price of a sack of flour will tell us more about people’s lives in a given era than the details of court intrigues, and that the history of great social processes can only be explained by investigating the world of material culture and numbers: for example, demographic or monetary analyses.
