Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship 1300–1900 (review)

Since the end of the 1990s, Sabean has been sponsoring a wide-ranging collaborative enquiry with the laudable aim of reviving and re-assessing the utility of kinship as an analytical concept in Europe’s modern history, building on his own, earlier micro-studies of Neckarhausen. This initiative began after a scholarly generation when historians—exactly like anthropologists—had turned away from a kin-based approach, believing that one mark of modernity was its reduced importance, and even disappearance. The first product of this scholarly pursuit was Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900) (New York, 2007), edited by Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and John Mathieu, which set out the intellectual case for returning to kinship as an analytical tool and posited two key transformations. At the end of the Middle Ages, notably fluid social patterns gave way to a system that was agnatic, patrilineal, and vertical, with descent between generations accompanied by a strong sense of lineage. This system survived into the eighteenth century, when it began to be superseded by a horizontally organized system of consanguineal kindreds characterized by much more affection within families, which persisted into the twentieth century.

The present volume builds on its predecessor and explores the impact of these changes upon younger children, who are neglected in studies of past societies, particularly those in which primogeniture prevailed. An editorial introduction lucidly outlines the main themes and problems. It is followed by a dozen articles, most of which have important points to make about the position of cadets and the inheritance arrangements for them. The chapters about the early modern period are more wide-ranging, and several are outstanding. Bernard Derouet (in what is sadly likely to be one of his final publications; he died while the volume was in production) contributes a characteristically well-crafted and subtle examination of the “dowry as a modality of exclusion from the patrimony” (31), revealing how completely the prevailing patrilinear inheritance system determined family roles.

Sophie Ruppel distils her detailed research on German princely society into an illuminating survey of seventeenth-century courts, underlining the importance of hierarchies established by birth order within aristocratic sibling relationships, in contrast to the much more equal relationships between siblings in the later modern period. Benjamin Marschke provides an important reminder of the hidden and often-neglected succession problems of Brandenburg-Prussia’s ruling family during its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emergence. Finally, Gérard Delille, in the most important contribution of the volume, offers a further instalment in his seminal re-interpretation of marital and inheritance patterns between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, demonstrating how the demographic consequences of primogeniture, and the restricted marriage that often accompanied it, undermined the early modern system of kinship identified by Sabean. Delille’s remarkable ability to operate at both the micro- and the macro-level of analysis gives his conclusions especial force.

The essays on the period after c.1750 are not of the same significance; three out of the six have already been published in easily accessible places. The most substantial are Christopher Johnson’s exploration of the emotional life of a nineteenth-century Breton family through an illuminating, and remarkably extensive, surviving correspondence, and Leonore Davidoff ’s revealing exploration of sibling tensions within the extended Gladstone family, which provides an unexpected new perspective on the life of William Ewart Gladstone, who served as Britain’s prime minister four times from 1868 to 1894. In the second half of the book, family micro-narratives and literary sources come to the fore, in contrast to the more rigorously analytical approach of the early modern articles.

This volume, and the wider project of which it forms one part, are significant contributions to the current re-assessment of kinship, and planned volumes on transnational families and the importance of blood in defining kin are eagerly awaited. Yet, although the broad lines of Sabean’s double transformation can be accepted...