Gender and Divorce in Europe: 1600 – 1900

Gender and Divorce in Europe: 1600 – 1900
Author: Andrea Griesebner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-08-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000929612

Getting divorced and remarried are now common practices in European societies, even if the rules differ from one country to the next. Civil marriage law still echoes religious marriage law, which for centuries determined which persons could enter into marriage with each other and how validly contracted marriages could be ended. Religions and denominations also had different regulations regarding whether a divorce only ended marital obligations or also permitted remarriage during the lifetime of the divorced spouse. This book deals with predominantly handwritten documents of divorce proceedings from the British Isles to Western, Central, and Southeastern Europe, and from 1600 to the 1930s. The praxeological analysis reveals the arguments and strategies put forward to obtain or prevent divorce, as well as the social and, above all, economic conditions and arrangements connected with divorce. The contributions break new ground by combining previously often separate fields of research and regions of investigation. It makes clear that the gender order doesn’t always run along religious lines, as was too often assumed. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of economic, social, religious, cultural, legal, and gender history as well as gender and well-being in a broader sense.

Women and Family Property

Women and Family Property
Author: Beatrice Moring
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2024-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1003847412

This book examines property legislation and the actual position of women in receiving, holding and passing on family property as daughters, wives and as widows throughout history. Traditionally the prevailing view has been that women have been disadvantaged in the distribution of property and therefore less interesting as objects of study. This volume challenges this view and explores the securing of property for families or for individuals through transfers in the shape of dowries, marriage contracts, wills and other arrangements, as well as how women used and distributed the property they were holding.The scope of the volume is both urban and rural, analysing the position of women in relation to family property through contributions from a wide geographic area. The chapters investigate the situation in southern and northern Europe, across the Atlantic and Africa throughout the 18th to the 20th century. This volume will be of value to academics, undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in gender and history and social history.

Litigating Women

Litigating Women
Author: Teresa Phipps
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 100052888X

This edited collection, written by both established and new researchers, reveals the experiences of litigating women across premodern Europe and captures the current state of research in this ever-growing field. Individually, the chapters offer an insight into the motivations and strategies of women who engaged in legal action in a wide range of courts, from local rural and urban courts, to ecclesiastical courts and the highest jurisdictions of crown and parliament. Collectively, the focus on individual women litigants – rather than how women were defined by legal systems – highlights continuities in their experiences of justice, while also demonstrating the unique and intersecting factors that influenced each woman’s negotiation of the courts. Spanning a broad chronology and a wide range of contexts, these studies also offer a valuable insight into the practices and priorities of the many courts under discussion that goes beyond our focus on women litigants. Drawing on archival research from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Central and Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, Litigating Women is the perfect resource for students and scholars interested in legal studies and gender in medieval and early modern Europe.

Landless Households in Rural Europe, 1600-1900

Landless Households in Rural Europe, 1600-1900
Author: Christine Fertig
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Europe
ISBN: 178327722X

First comparative study of landless households brings out their major role in European history and society.

Administrating Kinship: Marriage Impediments and Dispensation Policies in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Administrating Kinship: Marriage Impediments and Dispensation Policies in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Author: Margareth Lanzinger
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2023-05-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9004539875

From the late eighteenth century, more and more men and women wished to marry their cousins or in-laws. This aim was primarily linked to changes in marriage concepts, which were increasingly based on familiarity. Wealthy as well as economically precarious households counted on related marriage partners. Such unions, however, faced centuries-old marriage impediments. Bridal couples had to apply for a papal dispensation. This meant a hurdled, lengthy and also expensive procedure. This book shows that applicants in four dioceses – Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trent – took very different paths through the thicket of bureaucracy to achieve their goal. How did they argue their marriage projects? How did they succeed and why did so many fail? Tenacity often proved decisive in the end.

Fragile Families

Fragile Families
Author: Joachim Eibach
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2023-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3111081702

In the era of bourgeois modernity (1750–1900), the family is as valued as it is vulnerable. It constitutes a community of care, conflict, and emotion. Time and again, it is evoked as a bond of love as well as a moral institution. Yet both love and morality are fragile. A more detailed exploration reveals that domestic life during this period was much more colorful, open, and dynamic – and also more prone to crisis – than one might expect given the vaunted view of the family that characterized the heyday of the bourgeoisie. This book rewrites the history of the modern family. Self-narratives – primarily diaries – written by members of eight families from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria serve as sources for this research. The focus extends far beyond the bourgeoisie. With a micro-historical eye, the author reconstructs family histories from the peasant milieu to the patrician elite, from the parsonage to the educated bourgeoisie; he considers the domestic life of a journeyman craftsman, a couple’s descent from the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie, the effects of an itinerant childhood among the proletariat, and the strain of being caught between a bourgeois family and artistic individuality. Many of these aspects point beyond bourgeois modernity to the family in our time.

Body, Self and Melancholy

Body, Self and Melancholy
Author: Siglinde Clementi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000936309

This book addresses early modern concepts of the body and the self – focussing on three self-narratives authored by the nobleman Osvaldo Ercole Trapp (1634–1710), a body description from head to foot, autobiographical writings, and a brief chronicle of the House of Trapp-Caldonazzo. Approaching the complex theme of the question of the early modern self and the historical body, this book intertwines consistent contextualisation and historicisation of self-interpretation and biography. This is done in three steps: first, the content and function of these self-narratives are analysed with reference to current research on early modern self-narratives. In a second step, the life and family history of Osvaldo Ercole Trapp are examined from a microhistorical perspective and placed within the context of the early modern history of Tyrol’s nobility. A third step then goes into detail on individual contexts and discourses that refine one’s comprehension of these self-narratives: noble masculinity; family, house and line; theories of procreation and education; body experience and body images. It combines textual analysis, historical anthropology with a strong gender-historical perspective, microhistory and the history of the body as a history of experience and discourse. With this approach, the study makes an innovative contribution to early modern studies on self-narratives, social history of early modern nobility and the history of the body as the history of experience and discourse. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars alike interested in intellectual, social and cultural history.

The Social Topography of a Rural Community

The Social Topography of a Rural Community
Author: Steve Hindle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2023-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192694731

The Social Topography of a Rural Community is a micro-history of an exceptionally well-documented seventeenth-century English village: Chilvers Coton in north-eastern Warwickshire. Drawing on a rich archive of sources, including an occupational census, detailed estate maps, account books, private journals, and hundreds of deeds and wills, and employing a novel micro-spatial methodology, it reconstructs the life experience of some 780 inhabitants spread across 176 households. This offers a unique opportunity to visualize members of an English rural community as they responded to, and in turn initiated, changes in social and economic activity, making their own history on their own terms. In so doing the book brings to the fore the social, economic, and spatial lives of people who have been marginalized from conventional historical discourse, and offers an unusual level of detail relating to the spatial and demographic details of local life. Each of the substantive chapters focuses on the contributions and experiences of a particular household in the parish-the mill, the vicarage, the alehouse, the blacksmith's forge, the hovels of the labourers and coalminers, the cottages of the nail-smiths and ribbon-weavers, the farms of the yeomen and craftsmen, and the manor house of Arbury Hall itself-locating them precisely on specific sites in the landscape and the built environment; and sketching the evolving 'taskscapes' in which the inhabitants dwelled. A novel contribution to spatial history, as well as early modern material, social and economic history more generally, this study represents a highly original analysis of the significance of place, space, and flow in the history of English rural communities.