Kinship in Europe: a new approach to long-term development

Abstract

Kinship has been said to be in decline at almost every moment during Western history.Historians have viewed the appearance of the most diverse new social structures-guilds and brotherhoods in the Middle Ages, the state in the early modern period, the market and voluntary associations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or social security in the twentieth-as either displacing kinship or replacing its lost functions.Western self-identity has a heavy investment in understanding the long-term development of its kinship practices as successive contractions toward the modern nuclear family.Within this framework, kinship is the functional predecessor of almost everything, but never a constructive factor in the emergence of anything.In what follows, we will suggest that a growing number of studies not only contradict widely held assumptions about the declining importance of kinship, but also point to broad, common, structural shifts in the configurations of kin across Europe between the Middle Ages and the early modern period and again at the turn of the modern era.In this introduction and in this book, we do not bring the story of kinship into the twentieth century, which would require considerations of a third transition and new structural features that demand treatment in their own right.

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