New households are created through marriage, which begins with a betrothal. Betrothal in the post-Imperial world was a site of negotiation, both for individual families and for competing cultural mores. It has also been a site of tense disagreement for scholars of the period, who have found many unique – and sometimes fictional – elements in post-Imperial betrothal practices, most notoriously the concepts of friedelehe (‘marriage by mutual consent’), kaufehe (‘marriage by purchase’), and raubehe (‘marriage by capture’) as specific and unique forms of marriage defined by their beginnings at betrothal. These fictions have now been decisively rejected by modern scholarship but their lasting influence demonstrates the problems that have been endemic to discussions of the post-Imperial family. However, betrothal and marriage are not the sole points of the beginning of a family unit. They mark the start of the new household and couple, but it is the arrival of new legitimate children that is vital. As we shall see, the production and raising of legitimate heirs and children is a central function of family and marriages in almost all textual genres.

Thus, Part 1 explores the issues which surround betrothal and how households and families were created in the post-Imperial West, highlighting the various competing issues that were raised across different genres of texts. These range from complex negotiations surrounding property transfer between families at betrothal and marriage and the meaning of that property, to the emotional expectations and experiences surrounding betrothal and families. In addition, Part 1 also considers the decision to have children and the specific motivators – both legal and affective – for the decision over whether to reproduce or not. It explores the issues of abortion, infanticide and abandonment in order to fully consider the purpose of such family planning strategies.