Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739 (review)

I belong to that generation in which family history was a jumble of numbers and charts. Closely linked to demography, it was largely about mean and modal ages of marriage, age differences between husbands and wives, percentages of women who married while pregnant, and subsequent intervals between births. In the 1970s the statistically driven form of family history merged with social history, morphing into debates over stem-families versus nuclear families, the rise of affectionate marriage, and, thanks to Philippe Ariès, the place of children within the hearth. Family history also became linked to economic history in the guise of detailed investigations of dowry arrangements, the family's role in proto-industrialization, and intergenerational studies focused on family strategies for social mobility and economic success.

Casey adopts a different approach, weaving family history into the very fabric of urban life. His book, in fact, is as much about Granada as the family, offering insights into the city's population — ca. 50,000 in 1561 — its economy, based primarily on the silk trade in the sixteenth century, and legal and political institutions, along with its spiritual life. We also learn that Granada in 1561 was home to about 1,000 slaves, mostly in domestic service, although by the seventeenth century this sector of the population dwindled almost to naught.

The richness of Casey's research places this book at the forefront of other recent publications on early modern Granada, among them important monographs by David Coleman and A. Katie Harris (Creating Christian Granada: Society and Culture in an Old-World Frontier City 1492–1600 [2003]; From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City's Past in Early Modern Spain [2007]). In this case, Granada is but a stage for Casey's major concern: the manner in which the city's patrician families sustained themselves over the course of two centuries. Here, Casey reminds us that, following its conquest by Spain's Christian rulers in 1492, Granada was a "frontier town" (25) that, lacking an entrenched aristocracy, enabled newcomers to make it big. The successful did so over the course of several generations by making the classic move from commerce and trade into land, tax farming, and then municipal office. Honors, in the form of patents and nobility, and coveted membership in one of Spain's military orders, came later. Underscoring the monied origins of this local elite, Casey refers to these arrivistes as "nobles of the doubloon" (31).

Yet office and honor required family discipline, and here is where Casey's study, based on a rich amalgam of archival sources, literature, and contemporary chronicles, is at its best. Family, for Casey, is elastic, stretching across various generations, and he demonstrates the various strategies that enabled families not only to climb the social ladder, but also to stay there. When it came to marriage, for example, there was "little room for personal preference" (108), although in a fascinating chapter aptly titled "Blood Wedding," he serves up, à la Boccaccio, tales of ill-starred romances, forced weddings, women who refused to wed mates their parents had chosen ("First the sun would have to fail"), and others who announced: "they can break me into a thousand pieces, but I will marry him" (129). Overall, family interests prevailed, and this, according to Casey, accounts for the absence of portraiture in seventeenth-century Granada as opposed to family chapels and burial vaults.

Yet few of these patrician families, especially those in municipal office, were strictly out for themselves. Community and confraternity loomed large, charity as well. As the self-proclaimed "defenders of the fatherland" (25), these patricians also took pride in their city, working hard both to cap popular disturbances and to keep royal tax collectors, ever on the lookout for new revenue sources, in check.

In the end, Casey's Granada is a traditional, dare I say, provincial city that...