Religion and the Decline of Fertility in the Western World

The impact of religion on family and reproduction is one of the most fascinating and complex topics open to scholarly research, but the linkage between family and religion has received no systematic comparative study. This book explores relationships between religion and demography the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book offers a wealth of descriptive information on family life and fertility in different national and religious settings, and rich conceptual insight.


Renzo Derosas is associate professor at the Department of History of Ca' Foscari University, Venice, where he currently teaches Economic History. He has published extensively on Italian social and demographic history, on comparative demographic history, and on historical methods.

Frans van Poppel is senior researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague, and was associate professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Demographer and historian, he has published numerous articles on the population history of the Netherlands.