A historical community approach to social homogamy in the past

Abstract

This special issue is devoted to the theme of social homogamy, i.e. the likelihood of an individual marrying someone with the same social status, in past times. This introduction aims to situate each article within a broader framework of what unites this collection: a historical community approach to social homogamy in the past. This approach infuses sociological and historical theories in the historical debates on social homogamy. It does so using state-of-the-art research designs, with comparably coded large-scale datasets both on individuals and their families, as well as on the characteristics of the communities they lived in. Such a multi-level approach is deemed valuable as the communities considerably influenced marriage patterns.