Abstract
The preservation or the change of the population structure is often strictly related to the acquisition or loss of behavioural models: the choice of the wedding period is among them.
Analysing the period in which people marry, it is possible to point out modifications in the economy, in the work calendar and it also can be helpful to determine the importance of religious traditions.
In this work, the authors study the marriage seasonality of nine rural European populations in France, Spain and Italy and its evolution during the last two centuries. The research has allowed to point out three different patterns of marriage seasonality: the Autumn marriage, the Winter marriage and populations with no remarkable seasonal variations. The first distribution results from the combination of work calendar, harsh climate in winter and religious traditions (the month of May consacrated to Maria, the Lent and Advent period), while the second one is due mostly to summer migrations.
The importance of these factors tend to reduce during the XX century, making the distributions more homogeneous.
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Lucchetti, E., Manfredini, M., Boetsch, G. et al. Changes in marriage seasonality among some european rural populations. Int. J. Anthropol. 11, 73–81 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02441413
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02441413