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10 - Evolving Families: Realities and Images of Stepfamilies, Remarriage, and Half-Siblings in Early Modern Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2021

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Abstract

‘Evolving Families’ examines remarriage and the stepfamily in Spain in the 1500s and 1600s. One in three children experienced the disruption of a parent's death with the possibility of the surviving parent's remarriage bringing a stepparent as well as stepsiblings or new half-siblings. The essay reviews how advice literature suggested strategies to cope with the bereavement and replacement phases of a stepfamily and analyzes archival records of births, marriages, testaments, estate inventories, and guardianship arrangements to reveal the gendered patterns of stepfamilies. Widowers were more likely to remarry and a younger first-time bride meant an extended fertility became a feature of many stepfamilies. Although family portraits were rare in Golden Age Spain, The Painter's Family by Diego Velázquez's son-in-law Juan Bautista del Mazo illustrates the half-siblings of two marriages to capture the expanded age range as well as the emotional connections, and disruptions imposed by death and remarriage.

Keywords: guardianship; stepfamily; remarriage; estate inventories; family portraits; Velázquez-del Mazo; half-siblings

Over the life cycle, an adult in early modern Europe could become a spouse, widow or widower, single parent, and then once again a spouse, with the possibility of repeating the cycle, as remarriage rates hovered between one-fifth to one-third of marriages. If a child in early modern Castile lived past its first birthday, he or she had more than a one in three chance of losing at least one parent to death's scythe before adulthood. By their very nature, families evolve over time as children are born, grow, and leave home, but the early modern stepfamily experienced further periods of change when a parent died and the surviving spouse entered into a union with a new partner. For the child, the introduction of a stepparent into the household meant the possibility of siblings (either stepbrothers and stepsisters or newborns) from the remarried couple. Stepfamilies literally ‘embodied time’, as their very existence resulted from the changes death and remarriage had created.

The stepfamily in early modern Spain had many configurations, first disrupted, then reassembled, enlarged, and diminished in a pattern that could be repeated over generations. The social connections, economic partnerships, and even emotional attachments between the family members that entered and exited the life of a child or adult can sometimes be glimpsed in the archival record as families struggled with inheritance and distribution of property.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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