News
ESSHC Leiden 2021 March 24-27.
ESSHC Leiden 2021 March 24-27.
Stepfamilies Across Cultures and Religions I & II & III
The triple panels of Stepfamilies Across Cultures and Religions I-III focus on Eastern and Northwestern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula from the 1500s to the mid 1800s to explore the impact of religious and cultural divides on stepfamily dynamics. The sessions study the making of stepfamilies via death or divorce followed by remarriage and the strategies used to connect children to new family units. Using court records, legal sources, egodocuments as well as visual representations we survey connections and disruptions between members of the stepfamily – stepmothers and stepfathers, stepchildren, half- and stepsiblings, and the wider stepkin network – across family types, social classes and ethnic groups. Investigating the social practices surrounding childbirth, marriage and remarriage, conversion and death, which were critical periods turning nuclear families into stepfamilies and vice versa, the sessions seek to generate new insights into how familial ties and conflicts, hierarchical relations and emotional bonds constantly created and recreated ideas about the stepfamily as a very common premodern family form.
Preliminary Programme
Saturday 27 March 2021 08.30-10.30 Stepfamilies across Cultures and Religions I
Network: Family and Demography Chair: Lyndan Warner
Organizer: Gabriella Erdélyi Discussant: Marianna Muravyeva
Gabriella Erdélyi: Stepfamily as Inheritance in Early Modern Hungary
Megan Moran: Stepmothers and Stepdaughters: Female Networks in Early Modern Florence
Katalin Simon: A Tale of Three Cities and Five Ethnic-religious Groups: the Family as a Process in 18th-century Pest, Buda/Ofen and Óbuda/Altofen
Árpád Tóth: Stepchildren in Lutheran Burgher Families in 18-19th-century Pressburg
Saturday 27 March 2021 11.00-13.00 Stepfamilies across Cultures and Religions II
Network: Family and Demography Chair: Almut Bues
Organizer: Gabriella Erdélyi Discussant: Gabriella Erdélyi
Monika Matay: Courtroom Dramas, Violence and Broken Families
Marianna Muravyeva: Honour Thy Step-Mother?: Violence in Early Modern Russian Stepfamilies
András Péter Szabó: Family Feud or Stepsibling Rivalry? Reading a Court Trial from Seventeenth-Century Habsburg Hungary
Adrienn Szilágyi: Searching Stepfamilies in Databases
Lyndan Warner: Stepfamilies in Northern France and the Southern Low Countries c. 1500s-1600s
Saturday 27 March 2021 14.00-16.00 Stepfamilies across Cultures and Religions III
Network: Family and Demography Chair: Monika Matay
Organizer: Gabriella Erdélyi Discussant: Lyndan Warner
Almut Bues: Dynasty as a Patchwork House or the (evil) Stepmother. The Example of Zofia Jagiellonka
Katarzyna Kosior: Royal Step-motherhood, Political Motherhood, and Emotion in Early Modern Poland
Mercedes Llorente: The Image of Early Modern Spanish Habsburg Queens as Stepmothers and their Stepchildren
Laura Olivan: Politics of Emotions: Habsburg Stepfamily Relations (1648-1683)
