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Stepfamilies across Europe and overseas, 1550–1900 Lyndan Warner & Gabriella Erdélyi

‘Stepfamilies across Europe and overseas, 1550–1900’ investigates historical demography, remarriage patterns and emotional attachments of stepfamilies in Europe and some of the territories in the colonial world. This special issue began as a way to build on collaborative research in the edited collection Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400–1800 outlining stepfamily patterns in Europe across the Protestant Nordic countries and into the Netherlands, England, Germany to more Catholic regions such as southern France, Italy, Spain and venturing further east to Austria and Hungary (Warner, 2018, 2016). This collective research on Western to Central European stepfamily patterns was extended to Central and Eastern Europe when a team of researchers in Gabriella Erdélyi’s ‘Integrating Families’ project explored the historical demography and types of stepfamilies in Hungary (including modern-day Slovakia, Croatia and Transylvania in Romania), Bohemia (Czech Republic), the Romanian Principalities, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (including beyond Poland and Lithuania, parts of Ukraine and Belorussia) across areas of Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Christian Orthodox faiths (Erdélyi, 2019; Erdélyi & Szabó, in press). Uniting these efforts, this special issue explores the cleavages as well as similarities in stepfamilies across European regions and peeks beyond the continent into the colonial territories of the Dutch and Portuguese empires.

The study is available here.