Palaeopathology of Danish skeletons

process of industrialization and urbanization. Woolf reveals the enduring roots of poverty in the disruptions offamily life by age, death, and illness, coupled with underemployment and subsistence wages, particularly for women, children, and the aged. He also explores the continuity in official attitudes towards poverty, and in the various strategies which became fashionable across Europe to combat the problem. Above all he brings out the centrality ofthe family unit, both as a moral and an economic institution, in the strategies ofthe poor and their betters alike. The final two chapters, on the records ofthe Florentine Congregation ofSan Giovanni Battista, bring out particularly well the tragicpas dedeux between the "family strategy ofsubsistence" and elite beliefs about "the centrality of the social role of the economically independent family unit" in a "world of structural poverty".