HOUSEHOLD AND FAMILY IN THE IBERIAN PENINSULA Robert Rowland I A more precise, though clumsier, title for this paper would perhaps be ‘Household and Family in Past Time and its impact in the Iberian Peninsula’ 1 . I shall not, in fact, be attempting the impossible task of summarizing, within the space of a conference paper, thirty years of research on household and family in Spain and Portugal. In relation to Spain, an excellent survey was in any case published a few years ago by David Reher (1996), and there would not be much point, in the context of this gathering, in attempting to complete his account with a summary of the research done in Portugal. As we are gathered here to celebrate the anniversary of the 1969 Cambridge Conference, and by extension of the volume which arose out of that meeting, it seems more appropriate to give some thought to the impact of that volume, and of its implicit research agenda, in the Iberian Peninsula. In Household and Family in Past Time (and presumably during the Cambridge conference from which it arose) scant mention was made of Spain or Portugal. Even Family Forms in Historic Europe (Wall et al., 1983), published a decade after its sister volume, cast only a passing glance at the Iberian Peninsula. Most of the research on household structure in these two countries has had, therefore, insofar as it proposes to relate in any way to the international discussions that were set in motion in Cambridge thirty years ago, to come to terms with the definition of the relevant issues that was worked out during the 1970s - without reference, I repeat, to Spain or Portugal - by the Cambridge Group and by those who engaged in direct or indirect discussions with members of the Group. Kinship, family and household dynamics were not, of course, entirely new fields of research in either Spain or Portugal. Le Play had included some Spanish examples in 1 This paper was first presented at the conference held in Palma de Mallorca in September, 1999 to mark the 30 th anniversary of the Cambridge conference which gave rise to the volume Household and Family in Past Time (Laslett and Wall, 1972).