Sibling Relations in Family History: Conflicts, Cooperation and Gender Roles (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Abstract

The texts presented here deal with sibling relations from a variety of perspectives: marriage laws, family lawsuits, transatlantic migration, the orphaned condition, family memory, the uses of domestic and educational spaces, and property transfers and exchanges (…). All the articles, each in its different way, suggest the centrality of horizontal ties to our understanding of family material and emotional dynamics and the shaping of the personal and social experience of individuals, both in aristocratic and non-aristocratic families. They all challenge the assumption that brothers and sisters were purely economically oriented and that the primogeniture system only caused anger among siblings. On the contrary, they emphasise the working of reciprocity, negotiation and cooperation, and place the sibling tie within a wider network of kinship interactions taking into account bilateral kin, cognates and in-laws. Far from being a fixed structure, the family was an idea in process, in constant renegotiation by its members, and cadets and sisters appear to play an active role in this social interaction.