Prior research on consanguinity and kin marriage in Western societies has remained surprisingly silent on the postwar period, when kin endogamy is often believed to have become completely obsolete. In this study, we combine historical and contemporary data to chart and understand long dur & eacute;e changes in the incidence of different types of kin marriage in the Netherlands from the 1840s until today. Our study shows that cousin marriages comprised 2.7% of all unions during the 1871-1880 period and decreased to approximately 1.5% during the 1911-1922 period. Sibling set exchange marriages peaked at 4.7% in the last decade of the nineteenth century, after which they declined to 2.8% between 1911-1922. Surprisingly, despite this overall decline, a slight resurgence in sibling set exchange partnerships occurred in the 1970s and 1980s among the members of the baby boom generation. Moreover, cousin marriages saw a slight rise among those born in the 1970s, possibly partly as a result of import marriages among migrant groups. Kinship availability, religious-ideological group formation, and class-and education-based assortative mating explain these different trends, often reinforcing each other, and thereby producing specific spatial patterns of kin marriage. Our findings show that trends and patterns of kin endogamy were highly path-dependent and may wax and wane conditional on historical circumstances.
This article examines the interplay between theoretical interpretations of earthquakes and the practical efforts to mitigate their effects in the pre-modern era. Between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, shifting explanations-from Aristotelian and theological to mechanistic and naturalistic-coexisted with emerging insights into structural vulnerability and safety. Major earthquakes in 1570, 1638, 1688, and 1693 served as testing grounds for new ideas about construction and urban planning, though their impact remained limited. Following the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Calabrian earthquakes of 1783, debates in Italian academies contrasted natural electricism with volcanism, while the first technical building guidelines marked a step toward modern seismic awareness. Yet economic and political constraints hindered their implementation, revealing the persistent gap between scientific understanding and practical means of protection.
This article revisits David Sabean's study of Neckarhausen, exploring how social-historical research on kinship can be conducted today using digitized sources, online databases, and new analytical tools. To demonstrate some of the possibilities these sources offer researchers, we present two data corpora: the Neckarhausen Research Database and a subset of the Online Heritage Books (Ortsfamilienb & uuml;cher), which covers W & uuml;rttemberg, northwest Germany, and the county of Wittgenstein. Using these corpora, we identify the first couples to marry kin of specific types and contextualize their choices through legal norms, regional dynamics, and database information. A tentative comparison reveals a recurring link between innovative marriage strategies and local power holders-a pattern first observed by Sabean-though these actors differed in their positions of power. In the southwest, they were office-holding farmers; in the northwest, they were large-scale landowners; and in Wittgenstein, they were princely elites. We argue that digital history can facilitate the kind of micro-historical, network-based, variation-seeking analysis that Sabean envisioned and pioneered on a wider scale. Recognizing that Sabean's kinship study does not primarily rely on demographics or statistics, but rather is a comparative reconstruction of kin networks, underscores its foundational role in historical kinship research today.
This article aims to explore the historical ways in which kinship configurations were thought of and talked about in the early modern period, from a gendered perspective. This article demonstrates that the so-called << deceased wife's sister >>, one of the most debated figures in early modern discourse on incest, is a product of a male-centered perspective. Shifting the focus from the << deceased wife's sister >> to the << deceased sister's husband >> reveals different perspectives on a social, economic and emotional blank space that occurred in early modern households after a wife deceased. It should be shown, that even seemingly timeless and gender-neutral designations of kinship positions and degrees have a gender-specific history that shaped social relationships such as kinship and also genealogical matters. Discourses on kinship can be recognized that way as the product of gender-specific historical practices.
David Sabean's brilliant synthesis A Delicate Choreography raises many questions about the history of sexuality-which is obviously closely linked to the history of kinship but has a different tradition in practice. Controlling illicit sexuality had a direct impact on the transfer of goods and money, allowing for the establishment of more stable and legally recognized dynasties. For this reason, it is important to examine the relationship between decisive turns in both fields of research, the histories of kinship and sexuality. This paper is divided into two parts, discussing two crucial problems in the logic of Sabean's interpretation of kinship evolution. In the first part, I will examine the chronology of changes in sexuality and their connection with the transition of kinship, questioning the means to ensure a new reproductive discipline, especially the repression of diabolical witchcraft from the fifteenth century onwards. In the second part, I will address the crucial question of milieu formation around privileged kinship networks. To this end, I will focus on the popular yet still understudied Catholic confraternities. Building on my considerations from the first part, I will argue that Catholic confraternities can be seen as a program for the re-Christianization of society.
Research in the last thirty years have provided enough information to make clear that green cover was the way to keep field fertility. In the 13th-16th centuries Cistercian fathers of Chiaravalle monastery near Milan were able to gain control of a large area of marginal and common lands which lay abandoned between Milan and Lodi. Common pastures were replaced by sown meadows later improved as watered meadows when irrigation canals were dug by the religious orders and lay lordships. After the 1560s workers from Lodi worked in Turin to improve the fodders of ducal estates and a similar management of meadows created private fortunes in Mantua. Sown clovers and other grasses supported large cattle and sheep flocks managed by specialist shephards from Bergamo, rich in capitals and cash: green cover field fertility for the landlord only. This course of husbandry worked well for the large estates run by the religious orders and noble lordships but left smaller sharecroppers and owner occupiers short of fodder. Year 1610 choosen by Lewis and Maslin (2015) to mark the beginning of the anthropocene serve well to illustrate field fertility practices in the light of the climatic crisis of the early 17(th) century.
The essay sheds light on the complex system of practices of ethical redistribution of private wealth conveyed by the execution, often slow and partial, of the testamentary dispositions pro anima in late thirteenth-century Siena. A system whose main protagonists were the lay executors chosen by the testators from among their family, friends and business companions, who were progressively flanked and superimposed, with the intentions of coordination and control, an apparatus of figures of authority and specialized operators, populated by clerics but also by lay or semi-religious - merchants, notaries, artisans - accredited not only by a recognized reputation for moral rectitude, also by solid technical skills in the writing and economic management of the sums tied to pious causes. Through the detailed examination of a good number of private execution records prior to the plague, choices and strategies adopted during execution in the selection of the poor are identified, highlighting a tendency to reorient the redistribution circuits towards an audience of non-anonymous recipients, known and recognized as included parties, albeit fragile, of the civitas.
The article deals with the shameful poor in the 18(th) century Turin. This form of poverty is a socio-legal device used by families to make it possible a vertical hereditary transmission based on male primogeniture, liquidating the ambitions of other branches by providing dowries to the women of the kinship over the long term. The legal devices prescribing dowries through forms of charity are typically perpetual. The ideology of the shameful poor holds that the condition of being poor is determined by a relative impoverishment, if compared to a previous situation. According to this cultural perspective, the loss of assets does not lead to absolute poverty but thwarts reaching social needs, usually pursued by noble fmailies. In Turin, however, other members of social groups still in formation during the 18(th) century, such as state servants and professionals, also define themselves as shamefully poor in an imitation game with nobility. Shameful poverty helps to specify and define what these groups are. Charity and shameful poverty are intrinsically linked, and it is not coincidental that urban confraternities specializing in the shameful poor in Italy (institutions like the Compagnia San Paolo in Turin, the Congregazione di Loreto in Milan, or the Congrega della Carit & agrave; Apostolica in Brescia) are also specialists in providing dowries to poor young women. The particular characterization of shameful poverty as relative poverty allows kin of wealthy and noble families to qualify themselves as poor.
With the arrival of the Qing Empire in the Miao territories of Guizhou Province in the early 18(th) century-driven by the need to procure timber for imperial construction in Beijing-the central state granted three local Miao villages a monopoly over timber exploitation. This decision provoked long-standing contestation from downstream Han villages. This article traces the evolution of this dispute into the 19(th )century, focusing on the written petitions addressed to provincial authorities. These writings were not merely descriptive records of events, but active interventions in the dispute itself. Viewed as forms of action, they offer a valuable lens through which to analyze how timber-related actors expressed a sense of injustice in relation to the imperial legal system. This article argues that these petitions were not only local grievances but also political texts that actively engaged with-and helped shape-changing local dynamics of power.
While major urban planning projects have been the subject of a rich historiography, the possibility for residents to participate in these undertakings remains little studied. The archives created in the course of the expansion of the city of Marseille from 1666 onwards, and in particular the correspondence of the Intendance, reveal the attempts made by the residents to modify or reject some of the projects planned as part of the city's expansion. In this way, through the arbitration of the Intendant de Provence, the residents of the city played a direct role in its embellishment and influenced its structure. In this context, we argue that, even within the given framework of an urban planning project conceived over a specific period of time and according to predetermined plans, the intervention of the inhabitants is inevitable and determines the final result. The city, in its material form, is thus the basis for a study of inhabitant intervention, the consensus between the forms of authority of the Ancien R & eacute;gime-the Comptroller General of Finances, the Intendant of Provence, but also the municipality and the aldermen-and the residents. Finally, the study of these forms of participation provides an insight into the complainants' conception of the status of inhabitant or owner and the rights they attached to it.
From the 1540s, the status of persona miserabilis started to be applied to the Indigenous peoples of Spanish America. This concept was invoked to justify the appointment of lawyers specialized in representing the Natives and of interpreters of autochthonous languages in the American courts of justice. But how did Indigenous peoples make use of this concept in their communication with the king of Spain? This article addresses this issue through the analysis of two petitions written in Maya Yucatec and translated into Castilian that a series of caciques from Yucatan sent to Philip II in 1567 and 1580. We examine how the caciques translated the word miserable into Maya Yucatec and how they used this concept to convince the king the meet their claims. We argue that the discourse on the Passion of Christ, as translated into Yucatec Maya under Franciscan supervision, might have been pivotal in the translation of the concept of persona miserabilis into Maya Yucatec language.
This study explores the various forms taken by the jurisdiction over the poor and miserable>> in the Savoyard state, where multiple institutions and these vulnerable populations. Using petitions addressed to the monarch, the article analyzes thousands of requests concerning debt and credit issues in the of the poor>> functioned as an essential instrument of governance; it involved the ability to designate the weaker>> party in a contract, act as a protector, and guarantee the just>> conduct of exchanges. Simultaneously, the ability to declare and be recognized as poor could alter the social rules of the game, particularly within the marketplace. Through the relationships established in these petitions, both parties played a central role in constructing social a crucial component of the social fabric.
The pater pauperum-the father of the poor - is a recurring figure in Patristic and ecclesiastical tradition. This role conveys economic stewardship, as the bishop administers Church goods on behalf of the paupers. In fourteenth-century legal thought, however, it takes on a more technical meaning: it denotes a testamentary function in which the bishop acts as the executor of the pious bequests. Early-modern jurists credit Baldus de Ubaldis with formalizing this figure and putting it to legal use. In his writing, the pater pauperum emerges at the intersection of two concepts: the pater, who exercises stewardship over the goods of the poor, and the poor themselves, conceived as a collective, corporate legal subject. As such, it not only holds, manages and situates the goods on behalf of the poor but also represents the corporate body they form, serving as a central agent in the community's charitable economy. The concept draws on the canon law tradition concerning the dispensation of the male ablata, which Baldus appears to parallel in order to define and delimit episcopal competence on pious bequests. The pater pauperum figures as a deeply economic instrument of governance-dispensatory in nature and later adopted by secular jurisdictions within early-modern charitable systems-.
This paper proposes a new comprehensive analysis of the diplomas issued by the kings of Italy Hugh (926-946) and Lothar II(931-950). The study of the surviving original charters draws on the recent paradigm shift in the interpretation of the structures of early medieval << chanceries >>, the forms of issuing of royal diplomas and, more generally, the system of public documentation. On the one hand, diplomas are here reconsidered in their archival sequences, setting them free of the << monumentalization >> imposed by modern serial editions. On the other, the different hands that drafted them are reexamined, as the scribes of documents of such great importance from the point of view of political and symbolic communication are not to be considered any longer as low-level functionaries working in rigidly structured << chancery offices >>. The paradigm shift allows to shed light on the complex and varied range of interactions that underpinned the issuing of a diploma: in some cases, the role of the royal court and the king's closest collaborators is prevalent, in others, the initiative comes from the recipients; at times, the intervention of high-profile intermediaries, who were also responsible for the actual drafting of the documents, is crucial. The new framework thus allows for a better reconstruction of the political workings of the kingdom and of the concrete scope for royal political action, providing also new bases for comparison with the subsequent Ottonian rule.
In a deindustrialized town in eastern France, economic crises and emigration leave behind masses of abandoned houses, for which the local community is responsible and incurs in debt. The phenomenon raises the question of the survival of the territorial community per se , its urban decorum, its demographic continuity, the perpetuation of its institutions. Therefore, a challenge arises for these houses and, more broadly, for the places where they are located, that can be analyzed in terms of reproduction, transmission, and succession. The ethnography shows how local elites attempt to manage and redistribute property to reliable owners, and the criteria they use for. It shows how presence, payment of taxes and care of buildings reconfigure social and political relations, creating rights within the realm of ownership and local belonging.
This article examines the disputes over a Guatemalan estate that arose before the Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos, a court responsible for overseeing the assets of deceased individuals in the Spanish Empire. The so-called << Sierra del Agua >>, a complex social aggregate that entangled people (heirs, tenants, administrators, creditors) and assets (land, buildings, a chapel, a sawmill, animals and enslaved person), was subject to numerous claims, with different parties having rights and responsibilities related to ownership, inheritance and administration. At the heart of these claims were operations to qualify assets as in danger or in actual ruin, which made it possible to act on the status of things and people and to break open the relationships between them, dissolving some and binding others. What the case analyzed ultimately shows is that in the culture of possession characterizing the early modern legal thought, the abandonment of things was seen as a possible attack on the common good, establishing a kind of quasi-servitude over privately owned assets that could be reactivated through the designation of ruin, to the point of allowing the de facto expropriation of the absent owner. Ownership, ultimately, had to be legitimized through actual presence and care, and an irresponsible owner could end up being dispossessed by the King's tribunals, to ensure the preservation of the kingdom's resources.
This article analyzes the two most common explanations for the deterioration of co-owned buildings in France: a collective << abdication >> of property; the cumulative effect of individual decisions or failures. It also questions why the State's efforts to solve this problem have not only failed, but often aggravate it. It highlights the logic of collective dispossession that leads to what we can call a << spiral of abandonment >>. As we will see, this logic is primarily the result of the law itself, which does not encourage collective management of co-owned buildings, as it is based on an individualistic conception of ownership. Secondly, it is the result of public policies that encourage low-income households to buy their own property without offering them sufficient protection. Finally, and paradoxically, it also results from the fact that public intervention procedures, in run-down co-owned buildings, deprive owners of the power to act that they have built up through the appropriating of co-ownership law. We will shed some light on these processes on the basis of a secondary analysis of data collected in different fields at two separate times. The initial surveys carried out in the 1990s, focused on co-owned properties in difficulty awaiting public help. The most recent survey, conducted in late 2010, concerned a co-owned property which had been the subject of the measure most typical of this policy - the safeguard procedure.
The article aims to approach the judicial uses of the figure << quiet and peaceful possession >> by small and medium farmers of the Cachapoal river valley in Chile (1820-1835). This context witnessed conflicts that were the result of the rise in land value and the formalization of possessions. This research was based on a sample of land rights lawsuits. A representative case study was selected, consisting of two lawsuits that involved a conflict of over 50 years among a multitude of relatives and neighbors. The trials showed that the judicial uses of << quiet and peaceful possession >> were conditioned by the specificity of this scenario. In a space without vacant land, with the reformulation of old possession agreements and with a judicial praxis based on the witness testimonies, the litigants interpreted this figure within the dyad of the land that was labored on or abandoned, based on the notion of continuous and ancient possession.
