Out of Love for My Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 by Amy Livingstone (review)

REVIEWS 263 medieval sources; and a general index of names to help students and scholars make efficient use of the many letters in this collection. This is a wonderful piece of scholarship that is both easy to use and a pleasure to read. The collection of Grosseteste’s letters opens the door for fresh research into Grosseteste’s life and times. More translations and editions of historically relevant texts like this one need to be made available to a broad audience . ANDREW FOGLEMAN, History, University of Southern California Amy Livingstone, Out of Love for My Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2010) xvi + 280 pp. Amy Livingstone’s book is an important new study that investigates aristocratic familial property-owning practices in the regions southwest of Paris during the postmillennial period. In so doing, Out of Love for My Kin complicates the notions of property, ownership, and family as they were understood in the Middle Ages. The book’s thesis maintains that aristocratic families were affective and affectionate units whose relationships were both vertical (by means of lineal agnatic-paternal and cognatic-maternal relatedness) and horizontal (by means of extended kin networks, such as aunts and uncles, cousins, and more distant relatives). Additionally, Livingstone believes the conjugal unit of marriage was a more mutually beneficial one than historiography has previously assumed. These affective natal and affinal family relationships were enacted most evidently in matters of inheritance. An older historiography maintains that in the years following “la mutation féodale” patterns of inheritance increasingly favored the right of the eldest son to receive undivided control of familial patrimony, and that this development resulted in an ever more patriarchal and closed society. Responding to the touchstone work of Georges Duby, Livingstone says, “Primogeniture and patrilineage were indeed options for inheritance modes and family organization available to the nobility in the lands of the Loire, but they were not the dominant hues” (112). By problematizing the development of exclusive patrilineage, Livingstone qualifies a central tenet of the “feudalization” hypothesis, namely the rise of systemic and ubiquitous primogeniture. Livingstone assembles an impressive array of sources in order to examine family as a category within a medieval context, including charters (and cartularies ), romance literature, obituaries, histories (including biographies, autobiographies , chronicles, annals, and narrative histories), epistles, and hagiographies—all of which are considered and queried for their particularized understandings of family, property, inheritance, and custom (4–6). Her work is complementary to that of Theodore Evergates, whose recent study of inheritance patterns in the County of Champagne articulates similar concerns and comes to similar conclusions, though Evergates adopts a more prosopographical and quantitative approach.6 Livingstone’s book fits within a recent historiographical turn that views totalizing systems—such as primogeniture—with 6 Theodore Evergates, The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne (Philadelphia 2007). REVIEWS 264 suspicion. These historians eschew rigid structures and deterministic patterns in favor of a messier depiction of medieval circumstance as complicated, infinitely exceptional, and difficult to characterize using the ossified concepts of previous historiographies. Livingstone, a professor at Wittenburg University, has published approximately ten articles since completing her doctorate at Michigan State University under the guidance of Richard E. Sullivan. These articles have focused primarily on noble women and family structure. She is most familiar with the Chartrain , it seems, which forms the northern apex of her “lands of the Loire,” (9). This book is her first monograph, and it represents a completion and extension of her earlier findings. Livingstone’s writing is clear, and her argumentative structure is cogent and compelling. Her monograph incorporates a wide selection of French-language historiography on the subjects of “feudalization” and family, bringing these historians to an otherwise-impoverished Anglophone audience . Livingstone distills her subjects into thirteen genealogical charts located in the appendix that illustrate the agnatic and cognatic kinship networks evinced in the source materials. Two maps preface her work, illustrating the physical geography of the Loire. Within the text, there are three tables explaining marriage customs along with one diagram depicting the kinship involved in one putatively representative property contestation. Livingstone divides her book into eight chapters, which are further subdivided into...