Carol Neel
Out of Love for My Kin is a major contribution to the historiography medieval families. In this volume, Livingstone focuses on thirteen noble lineages Loire Valley in prosopographical study enriched by attention related political, economic, and theological sources. The result thick history region from perspective marital, parental-child, sibling, extended affinal relationships. Livingstone’s work, discussion marriage alliances, child-rearing practices, patterns property transfer merges with exploration gender relations familial affect challenge dominant scholarly narrative elite kinship which works Georges Duby has thirty years been central. implications will be felt broadly, outside studies community, interpretation family well into modern period. As introduction emphasises, historical families are best explored through close single kindreds especially productively if those set cultural context, among contemporaneous analogues, as diachronic ideological perspective. varied sources Valley, romance literature twelfth thirteenth centuries, theology canon law throughout her work arrayed around documentation real experience spouses blood relations. She illuminates monastic necrologies, charters donation religious communities, transfers inheritance. Everywhere breathes life desiccated evidence human connectedness tracing individuals, marriages, filiations successive generations across cousinages. identifies an ‘ethos inclusivity’ primary feature marked contrast Duby’s determination twelfth-century shift patrilinearity, primogeniture, erosion noblewomen’s agency (see Lady Priest, Chivalrous Society, Marriage Middle Ages), indentifies ‘no fundamental structure during period under examination’. Her account stresses continuity against ‘rupture between aristocracies central Ages Carolingian centuries’ understood and, still earlier, Marc Bloch.
French History