Since the publication of Philippe Aries's book, Centuries of Childhood, in the early 1960s, there has been great interest among historians in the history of the family and the household. A central aspect of the debate relates the story of the family to implicit notions of modernization, with the rise of the nuclear family in the West as part of its economic and political success. During the past decade, however, that synthesis has begun to break down. Historians have begun to examine kinship - the way individual families are connected to each other through marriage and descent - finding that during the most dynamic period in European industrial development, class formation, and state reorganization, Europe became a "kinship hot" society. The essays in this volume explore two major transitions in kinship patterns - at the end of the Middle Ages and at the end of the eighteenth century - in an effort to reset the agenda in family history.

Over the past few years, the cross-disciplinary field of research devoted to family and kinship history in Europe has seen the emergence of an important stream of studies developing wide-ranging comparative perspectives on great spaces and long periods. Their hypotheses and interpretative models differ somewhat with regard of the factors taken into account, and of the underlying logic identified for these processes. The first part of this volume presents a broad discussion of these recent developments. The chapters in the second part have an alpine focus and are dealing more or less directly with the theoretical framework proposed by Dionigi Albera's book, Au fil des generations. The contributions to the third part of the book are further opening up the field. They leave the alpine terrain and are dedicated to some European contexts, with approaches that are generally influenced by the experience of Albera's analysis of Alpine Europe.

"On the whole, the general arguments made here for the continued importance of kinship in modernity, as well as the two major changes in kinship organization, are convincing. Kinship in Europe is also to be commended for its impressive array of subjects and the admirably diverse nature of its contributors. Above all, it manages to complicate traditional narratives of modernity, and provides a less simplistic, linear model of development." . H-German

Since the publication of Philippe Aries's book, Centuries of Childhood, in the early 1960s, there has been great interest among historians in the history of the family and the household. A central aspect of the debate relates the story of the family to implicit notions of modernization, with the rise of the nuclear family in the West as part of its economic and political success. And some historians have pushed the idea of the nuclear family back in time for the most successful regions of Europe. During the past decade that synthesis has begun to break down as historians have begun to examine kinship, the way individual families are connected to each other through marriage and descent, finding that during the most dynamic period in European industrial development, class formation, and state reorganization, Europe became a "kinship hot" society. The essays in this volume explore two major transitions in kinship patterns--at the end of the Middle Ages and at the end of the eighteenth century--in an effort to reset the agenda in family history.

David Warren Sabean has taught at the University of East Anglia, University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, and UCLA. He was a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for History (1976-83) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2001-2). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Forschungspreis (2004-6). He is currently the Henry J. Bruman Professor of German History at UCLA.

Simon Teuscher is Professor of History at the University of Basel. He has previously taught at UCLA (2000-2004) and Zurich (1995-99) and been a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004-5).

Jon Mathieu has taught in different universities in Switzerland and in other countries. He was the founding director of the Istituto di Storia delle Alpi at the University of Lugano (2000-5), currently he is Professor at the University of Lucerne."

A pioneering examination of the three-dimensionality of the earth from the perspective of history and the humanities. This book considers the variegated world of mountains and their development during the last 500 years. It takes as its starting point the United Nations environmental conference of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, where the mountains were officially recognised as a topic of the world community. Important precedents for this new agenda were built in the early modern period and in the nineteenth century, as European societies began to exceed their traditional limitations. The book begins with an investigation of this long-term process with respect to science, culture and politics, each of which has transformed our attitudes toward mountainous regions. It then takes up historical problems that have been debated in the latest research, placing them in a comparative framework. At the book's heart stands the question of whether and in what way the 'three-dimensional history' of mountain people may reveal distinctive forms of development.

In the 1700s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau celebrated the Alps as the quintessence of the triumph of nature over the ""horrors"" of civilization. Now available in English, History of the Alps, 1500-1900: Environment, Development, and Society provides a precise history of one of the greatest mountain range systems in the world. Jon Mathieu's work disproves a number of commonly held notions about the Alps, positioning them as neither an inversion of lowland society nor a world apart with respect to Europe. Mathieu's broad historical portrait addresses both the economic and sociopolitical - exploring the relationship between population levels, development, and the Alpine environment, as well as the complex links between agrarian structure, society, and the development of modern civilization. More detailed analysis examines the relationship between various agrarian structures and shifting political configurations, several aspects of family history between the late Middle Ages and the turn of the twentieth century, and exploration of the Savoy, Grisons, and Carinthia regions.

'There are mountains beyond the mountains' Chinese saying Mount Kailash in Asia, the Black Hills in North America, Uluru in Australia: around the globe there are numerous mountains that have been and continue to be attributed sacredness. Worship of these mountains involves prayer, meditation and pilgrimage. Christianity, which for a long time showed little interest in nature, provides a foil to these practices and was one factor in the tensions that arose in the age of colonialism. Decolonisation and the 'ecological turn' changed the religious power of interpretation and gave discourses about sacred mountains new meaning. Globally, however, they remain an outstanding example of cultural diversity, also touching on issues of gender justice and environmental protection. A translation from the original German.