the New York Times Book Review, said "Vast in theme, exhaustive in research and with a cast of characters beyond counting, the result is a veritable War and Peace of social history. Truly, this is scholarship on the grand scale." Some of his suggestions have been qualified by historians. Stone's suggestion that "affective individualism" did not become widely characteristic of marriage until the 18th century was questioned by medievalists who pointed to evidence of loving marriages before 1700. However, it was never Stone's position that love in marriage did not exist before the 18th century, and his book does not, in fact, say this. Stone was a major advocate of the new social history—that is using the methods of the social sciences to study history and expanding the target of study to include larger and larger populations. Stone argued that using quantitative methods to assemble data could lead to useful generalizations about different periods in time. However, Stone never argued in favor of creating "laws" of history in the manner of Karl Marx or Arnold J. Toynbee. In Stone's view, the most one could do was to create generalizations about a particular century and no more. Stone was very much interested in studying the mentalité of people in the early modern period along the lines of the Annales School, but Stone rejected Fernand Braudel's geographical theories as too simplistic. Along the same lines, Stone was very fond of combining history with anthropology and offering "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz. Narrative history According to Stone, narrative is the main rhetorical device traditionally used by historians. In 1979, at a time when Social History of the previous generation was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a revival in historiography of the narrative. Stone defined narrative as follows: it is organized chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative." Stone's methodology was mildly controversial. Stone's supposed thesis that the British political elite was relatively