The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

While the current discussion of ethnic, trade, and commercial diasporas, global networks, and transnational communities constantly makes reference to the importance of families and kinship groups for understanding the dynamics of dispersion, few studies examine the nature of these families in any detail. This book, centered largely on the European experience of families scattered geographically, challenges the dominant narratives of modernization by offering a long-term perspective from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Paradoxically, "transnational families" are to be found long before the nation-state was in place.

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.

The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

"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."

English summary: This is the first book to provide a broad outline of the hitherto unknown history of the premodern text. Following the new approach of historical semantics, the contributions look at how the term textus was used during the Middle Ages. Drawing on a wide range of sources (hagiography, historiography, rural, urban and canon law, letters, patristic and theological writings, images, musical notation), they enable the various usages of textus to be appreciated within various fields of tradition and action. Both long-term continuities and changes in meaning are revealed. German description: Der alltagliche und wissenschaftliche Umlauf des Wortes Text ist begleitet von weitgehender Unkenntnis uber seine Sinn- und Gebrauchsgeschichte. Gilt heute nahezu jeder schriftliche sinntragende Gegenstand als Text, war dies noch vor wenigen Jahrzehnten deutlich, in der Vormoderne sogar radikal anders. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes liefern die erste breit gefacherte Historisierung der vormodernen Geschichte des Textes. Einzelstudien uber Verskunst, Hagiographie, Historiographie, Briefe, Kirchenrecht, Liturgie, Theologie, universitares Lehrschrifttum, mittelhochdeutsche Dichtungen, landliches und stadtisches Recht, Illustrationen, Malerei und Musiknotate beleuchten langfristige linguistische Profile, Momente des Wortgebrauchs und wichtige Neuerungen wie Wandlungen des Begriffs Text.