The course The Mediterranean, a Space of Exchange (from Renaissance to Enlightenment) aims to explain the Mediterranean, using history and the analysis of the past, as a space generated by routes and circulation. We consider it crucial to disclose mobility as a historical factor: a mobility comprised of four major elements, namely people, objects, ideas and practices. In our analysis of Mediterranean reality between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, we will pay particular attention to its western shores, an area seething with transfers and exchanges, in the social and economic spheres as well as the political and cultural, with the Iberian Peninsula, the various islands and the Italian Peninsula, all spaces of great dynamism. El curso El Mediterráneo, espacio de intercambios (del Renacimiento a la Ilustración) quiere explicar, desde la historia y el análisis del pasado, el Mediterráneo como un espacio generado por las rutas y las circulaciones. Consideramos necesario divulgar la movilidad como factor histórico. Una movilidad centrada en cuatro grandes ámbitos: las personas, los objetos, las ideas y las prácticas. Al analizar la realidad mediterránea entre los siglos XV y XIX, del Renacimiento a la Ilustración, ponemos un foco especial en su orilla occidental, un área abocada a la transferencia y el intercambio, tanto en el ámbito social y económico como en el político y cultural, con la Península Ibérica, las islas y la Península Itálica como espacios de gran dinamismo.
The Family in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean
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From the course by Universitat de Barcelona
The Mediterranean, a Space of Exchange (from the Renaissance to Enlightenment)
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Universitat de Barcelona
139 ratings
From the lesson
The Mediterranean, Beliefs and Lifestyles - El Mediterráneo, creencias y formas de vida
Meet the Instructors
Mariela FargasProfessor
Department of Early Modern History
Àngel CasalsProfessor in Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Jaume DantíFull professor in Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Xavier GilFull professor in Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Miquel Àngel MartínezProfessor in Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Ida MauroTeacher assistant
Early Modern History
Joan-Lluís PalosProfessor in Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Mariàngeles Pérez SamperFull professor in Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Diego SolaDoctor in History
Early Modern History
Claudia TaribóPostgraduate Fellow
Early Modern History
[AUDIO EN BLANCO]
[AUDIO EN BLANCO] Hello.
My name is Daniela Fargas Piñarocha and I’m here to present the second part
of the topic entitled beliefs and lifestyles.
We’re at the Palacio Requesens,
current home of the Royal Academy of Letters in Barcelona.
Naturally, to talk of lifestyles we must refer to family life,
as this, the family, is the basic unit of social reproduction, the source,
and at the same time a space for social relations, sociabilities, the transmission of
customs, values, of inter-generational and community solidarities.
Let’s not forget that life in the modern era and, of course, in the
Western Mediterranean was above all a life of community and communities.
To understand family life is, therefore, to understand social life,
with all its variations and contrasts.
And specifically in the Western Mediterranean basin,
from the 16th century, to speak of the history of the family is to speak of
the Catholic reform and the imprint this left on family life,
in terms of the concept of family and of familial relations.
Secondly, although no less significant,
we must consider the contrasts and concomitants between country and city,
the increasingly pronounced gap between rich and poor,
processes that taken together become key in the modern era.
The Council of Trent, which took place
from 1545 to 1563, a landmark of the Catholic reform at the time, pushed the
gradual standardisation of the family in all its spheres of influence.
The Mediterranean basin was an area of implementation
par excellence under the guidance of Rome,
but especially of the Catholic monarchy, the Spanish monarchy.
Rapidly, its principles were spread through catechisms and a multitude of manuals
written by distinguished members of the clergy, also by famous humanists,
including, for example, the jesuit Tomás Sánchez, wrote an important work in Latin
on the sacrament of matrimony that was circulated
from the Iberian peninsula throughout all of Catholic Europe,a paradigmatic example,
then, of the circulation of ideas on the family model.
All together, from the pulpit, the confessional,
the preaching, these were everyday instruments
by which the message reached the great majority of the community.
And what were their principles?
Firstly, the Council of Trent proposed to clarify the definition and
legitimacy of the family, specifying the ritual of marriage,
in order to eradicate the many ancient and pagan customs
that proliferated and often caused confusion between legitimate matrimony
and mere marital cohabitation, which is to say, confusion between betrothal or
the promise of marriage and formal matrimony.
The basis of this ritual was public notification and, of course, public moralising.
Extra-marital relations were thus condemned,
as the cause of large numbers of illegitimate births, abandoned children and the
epidemic of clandestine marriages, which included the traditional practices of
many Mediterranean peoples, as a result of diverse interests at play.
This last point was also key to the Church, true matrimony came about
through the free will of spouses, paternal permission to marry was neither
prescriptive nor obligatory, although it is true that
provisions for witnesses and protestations for the valid celebration of matrimony
necessarily involved other family members in a marriage,
so, ultimately, the giving of advice, the concept of obedience and even
that of Mediterranean honour were very present elements of the entire process.
This contradiction was only resolved in the late 18th century,
when Catholic states regulated the requirement of paternal consent
for the union of spouses under 25 years of age.
It’s worth noting that in early modern times, the sense of freedom in matrimony
under the Church exalted its virtuous dimension,
so contested in the middle ages, and in terms of Mediterranean civilisation
this allows us to relate it to the Renaissance discovery of
the classical concepts of beauty and love.
So once the rules for forming a family were established,
what happened next?
To answer this question,
let’s take a look at the complex world of realities that go against the rules,
where the nuances, for example, country or city, rich or poor,
undo the standard model, at least in the early modern era,
and show us very diverse expectations and experiences.
For example, historians have considered the issue of the age of access
to matrimony.
Did people marry younger or older in those times?
Or in those specific areas under study?
The answer depends on the rural cycle,
the effects of the weather and the continual wars.
Rural people lived dependent on these elements and families
delayed or hurried the marriage of their children according to possibility.
And when financial resources didn’t stretch to feeding their mouths
migration to the city forced many to abandon the idea of marriage
as they became vagabonds, thieves and beggars.
The Mediterranean cities of the modern era grew
but they became poorer, if we consider the huge number of the marginalised,
incessantly searching for work to no avail.
For them the possibility of marriage vanished, or was only to be found
in places of charity that served as family substitutes or replacements.
This is a reality we should not lose sight of.
The family is key to understanding social life,
but there is also a strata that slipped through this model to live
without family, as a consequence and cause of extreme poverty and rootlessness.
Despite this possible risk reality, the Mediterranean family in the modern era
was a haven for the elderly, a place of learning and of work for the
youthful, of loyalty to lineage and neighbourhood solidarity.
The family stood within a network of support rather than as an isolated nucleus,
although it is no less true that it suffered through ruptures,
controversy and litigations, as the oft- challenged judicial archives show.
These testify to the constant tension between the group and the individual,
between family logic and personal aspiration, between men and women.
Certainly, during the modern era the family model went through a process of transformation,
evolving from that of the extended family of multiple co-residence
dominated by the strength of the lineage that governs and protects, to that of
the nuclear family, the model we have come to know from the 20th century, basically,
which revolves around the conjugal unit.
This process was closely linked to the growth of the suburban middle class and
the professional class and the influence of the modern State, which diluted
the old ties of lineage inspired in the feudal system.
But the process of change is slow and in the extensive rural areas
the strength of the traditional extended family model remained.
A model to be considered also within the context of the implementation
throughout the whole Western Mediterranean of a system of inheritance based on
primogeniture and exclusion, on the indivisibility of assets,
which occurred in the late middle ages with the recovery of the laws of the
Roman Code of Justinius, although it was mainly the noble and urban classes experiencing
upward mobility that bolstered this system
given its obvious advantages to social status and power.
This meant that among families that had assets to bequeath to their descendants
it became imperative to consolidate these assets to a single person,
with the preference being for primogeniture and masculinity,
so that the heirs would be responsible for maintaining the rest of the family,
those members excluded from the inheritance,
and complex co-residing nuclear families developed, vertical and horizontal.
This model could sustain a considerable number of children in celibacy
who could not marry as they did not have the resources to do so
or had opted for a life devoted to religion.
The patrimonial system and the Tridentine moral system,
which still held the celibate to be of a higher spiritual status than
those joined in matrimony, thus reinforced their position.
So parents, children, siblings, apprentices and servants would co-reside,
all considered to be members of the same kinship network,
all destined to different ends but interdependent,
as described also in classical Mediterranean literature regarding oikos.
An extended and hierarchical family,
while other quite distinct models also existed, the nuclear, perhaps more urbane,
the result of migrations, possibly diminished by poverty, or the widowed,
by the constant presence of death that decimated many households.
Much has been said about this hierarchisation of the modern family,
especially with regard to the place of women,
subordinate to their fathers and later to their husbands,
their state of dependence within what is called the patriarchal family.
In effect, the Western Mediterranean also experienced the consolidation
of this moral, social and political model of the family, and this intimate connection
between male family government and the government of the king
enabled the expansion of this idea.
All things considered, and in a time when the private and public often became confused,
the family broadly embraced the management of peoples lives,
and of community life, and women participated in this social management
as spouses, dowagers - in dramatically increased numbers
amongst the propertied classes aspiring to ennoblement - and above all as widows,
when solvency and the return of a dowry, an institution that gained strength,
permitted it.
Hierarchisation of the family has also been said to have had a minimising effect
on families, previously motivated by a concern for perpetuity and
structured on the basis of arranged marriages devised by the parents
and not by the couple involved,
but research into changes in the spaces comprising a residence,
particularly with regard to the middle and upper classes, where
increasingly houses had more private rooms rather than the old structures
of single multipurpose rooms where everyone ate and slept and convened,
suggest a rise in the sense of self, of intimacy and
thus, the emotional reunion between individuals and the family.
[AUDIO EN BLANCO]
[AUDIO EN BLANCO]
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