Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400-1800

Lyndan Warner is Associate Professor of History at Saint Mary's University, Canada. Her previous publications include Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe with Sandra Cavallo (1999) and The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law (2011).

Stepfamilies in Europe 1400 to 1800 addresses a significant gap in literature on the history of the family and provides an in-depth study into the complex family structures created upon remarriage and the impact that these new relationships had on the life course and life cycle of the family across a range of European countries.

List of Figures; List of Tables; Acknowledgements; Notes on the text; Notes on Contributors; Chapter 1: Introduction: Stepfamilies in the European Past; Chapter 2 Jewish families, conversion, and the creation of stepfamilies in Girona after the anti-Jewish violence of 1391; Chapter 3 Stepfamilies in Sweden, 1400 to 1650: the family in process between bloodlines and continuity; Chapter 4 Stepfamilies and inclusive families in early modern Venice; Chapter 5 Virtual stepfamilies: illegitimate children, half-siblings, and the early modern Spanish nobility; Chapter 6 Stepmothers at law in early modern England; Chapter 7 'The Riddle of Nijmegen' (Het Raadsel van Nijmegen), complicated marriages, stepfamilies and early modern Dutch law; Chapter 8 Stepfamilies and blended families in Protestant funeral sermons in early modern Germany; Chapter 9 Stepfamily relationships in autobiographical writings from seventeenth-century Hungary; Chapter10 Emotional bonds and the everyday logic of living arrangements: stepfamilies in dispensation records of late eighteenth-century Austria; Chapter 11 Stepfamily relationships in multigenerational households: the case of Toulouse, France in the eighteenth century; Chapter 12 Seeing Stepfamilies in European Visual Culture; Appendix: Visual Sources of the Stepfamily in the European Past, 1400-1800; Chapter 13 Conclusion: Continuity and Change in Stepfamily Lives, 1400-1800; Chapter 14 Suggestions for Further Reading; Index