Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

Chapter 3 continues the account of the contest between Mussolini and his unapologetically violent new movement and Amendola’s efforts to reform and defend liberal democracy. As a patriot and a liberal, Giovanni was as staunchly anti-Marxist as the sometime Marxist Mussolini had become. But with his armed squads and populist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s political recipe was more successful than Giovanni’s purism and rigour. By 1924, Amendola was the leader of the Aventine Secession, a rump of parliamentarians who withdrew from the Chamber of Deputies when Mussolini’s aides murdered their moderate socialist colleague, Matteotti. Amendola maintained his Anti-Fascist leadership until he was assaulted by Fascists in Tuscany in July 1925. After a retreat to Paris and two unsuccessful emergency operations, he died in Cannes in April 1926. While Giovanni was heavily engaged in politics, he continued to wrestle with his relationship with his wife, Eva Kühn, and their four children. Eva went in and out of mental institutions, whether fairly or not. At some point in these years, Giovanni entered into a relationship with the independent Bulgarian-French journalist Nelia Pavlova.

Through his first four decades, Giovanni Amendola strode energetically down the Italian road to liberalism. From his origins in an uncelebrated part of Campania, from a family clinging to the lowest rungs of the middle class, he moved determinedly up and up. En route, there were numerous staging posts: moderate socialism, religion of great variety (but never Catholicism), marriage to a ‘new woman’ from the Romanov empire, pure philosophy, political philosophy, academic life, political journalism, war service with promotion in his country’s officer corps, and then, in November 1919, election to the Chamber of Deputies for one of the seats in the College of Salerno. That first direct step towards political power was followed speedily by appointment to what was the outer cabinet, but with the crucial post-war task of helping to manage Italy’s finances. Within the framework of Italian liberalism, as set in place by the Risorgimento, other young men also emerged into political prominence. But few ranged quite was widely as young Giovanni Amendola.

The general matrix of medieval misogyny was based on women’s corporeal and moral inferiority as opposed to men, and found its ultimate biblical justification in the second version of the Creation (Genesis 2:18–23).1 After shaping [formavit] Adam from the slime of earth, God constructs [aedificavit] Eve from Adam’s rib, and she becomes bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. Despite the existence of the first version (Genesis 1:27), where God creates [creavit] man and woman at the same time and to his image, the second version will position the female from the beginning as a bodily derivate of the male. This inferiority acquires further moral dimension with the Fall (Genesis 3:1–7): the serpent approaches Eve, who will eat from the forbidden fruit and give it to Adam. The female is the one who is responsible for the hardships and sufferings of earthly existence, because of her proneness to transgression and deceit. The widespread dissemination of this second version to all strata of society continued to maintain and reinforce negative stereotypical attitudes toward women in the Middle Ages and beyond.

Accession to full title of Baron de Montesquieu. The Bordeaux parlement. Negotiations for his marriage with Jeanne de Lartigue. The inherited position of président à mortier. Observance of legal matters and study of Romans and of the sciences. His secret composition and anonymous publication of Persian Letters (1721). The subject matter and the fame of this book.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language. The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling.

The epilogue addresses the question of what can be ascertained from studying sex and reproduction in the longue durée. As demonstrated by the enduring reliance on abortion as birth control, family planning remains deeply gendered with women shouldering much of this burden. The persistence of eugenic ideas and the state’s intrusive but uneven policing of sexuality have been features of Chinese history since the early twentieth century. Despite ongoing changes in fertility policies, attitudes toward contraception and perceptions of what constitutes the ideal family remain diverse.

In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, the State Council ordered the establishment of community family planning programs. Taking up the call for “birth planning,” officials sought to weave birth control into the local cultural fabric through plays, exhibitions, and focus groups while countering the traditional preference for large families. Yet, resource shortages, contradictory messages from the state about the efficacy of traditional medicine, and individual distrust or dislike of birth control continually undermined efforts to more systematically monitor and control reproduction. In this context, contraceptive practices involved ongoing negotiation among diverse actors: provincial and local birth planning authorities, as well as individuals and their families.

This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of familial relationships within the ruling dynasties – both in terms of securing a successful transition from one generation of rulers to the next and with regard to the individual wellbeing of the royal heirs. Two key relationships are identified and explored through selected case studies: the relationship between the monarch and his or her successor (through the prism of the relationships between Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm I and Emperor Franz Joseph and their oldest sons) and the relationship between the royal heir and his wife – through an analysis of the marriages of Prince Umberto of Savoy, Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg and Prince Friedrich August of Saxony.

The formulas not only tell us about how people in the formulas’ world understood family relationships, but also sometimes reveal hints of how they felt about them. The formulas focus above all on the nuclear family. A good number of them deal with inheritance, in a variety of permutations that reveal tension as well as concord within families. Others deal with different kinds of property arrangements among members of families, including people who had been adopted into families. Still others highlight the needs and emotions that could drive family behavior. A number of formulas deal with those who had lost their families, namely orphans. The formulas dealing with family matters have a great deal to say about the lives of lay women in this world. Women appear not simply as passive objects in the arrangements reached by their male relatives and husbands, but as active agents who participated fully in the documentary culture around them. Some of the formulas that involve them also reveal that while the dominant norms disadvantaged women in the inheritance of property, those norms could be and frequently were breached in practice, even when they were framed in terms of law.

The formulas describe unfree men and women with terms that are fluid and overlapping, and that encompass everything from what we would call chattel slavery to loose patronage. The unfree most often appear as the passive objects of the power and interests of their betters. They are not a closed group, however. Free people submitted themselves to servitude either voluntarily or by force of circumstance, in exchange for money or to make amends for some wrong. Unfree were freed or bought their own freedom. The unfree also display a significant amount of agency. They ran away. They sought help against their own lords from other powerful people. Sometimes they stole things, including marriage partners. They contested their status, often with success. Some even owned other unfree. In short, the formulas tell us that status at the interface between free and unfree was fluid, and that while they spent much of their lives as the passive objects of power, the unfree in this world had the capacity to act in their own interests, were fully aware of how power flowed, and could work the social and political system to their own advantage.

This chapter traces the history of the Tolstoy family, dating Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s ancestry back to the fourteenth century. It begins with a brief explanation of the Tolstoy family’s complicated genealogy, distinguishing between the titled branch and the untitled Tver and Kutuzov branches. Next there is a brief overview of the Tolstoy family’s most famous scions, ranging from prominent statesmen to flamboyant individuals whose colorful lives consolidated the family reputation for eccentricity. There is also a brief discussion of the distinguished and troubled history of the Volkonsky family, Tolstoy’s maternal ancestors. The chapter then focuses on Tolstoy’s immediate family – his parents, brothers, sister, aunts and, of course, his wife Sofia Andreevna and their children. There is commentary on what they meant to him, both personally and creatively, and on how he drew on them, as well as his more distant forebears, to breathe flesh and blood into the iconic characters of his two great novels.

This chapter examines Tolstoy’s treatment of mortality – from his earliest published works to his last, and in letters, diaries, and conversations – as a long preparation for his own death. It draws especially from his later period, when he drew nearer to death and became increasingly focused on it, often reminding those around him, and his reading public, of their need to do the same. Thus, while Tolstoy anticipated death as a personal sacrament, he also created a context for the public to consider his passing as a collective examination of his values. The chapter concludes with Tolstoy’s death at Astapovo railway station in 1910, where he attempted to meet his own expectations for this moment within the spectacle created by a public bent on treating it as its own rite of passage.

While Ruskin was in Italy, writing home to his father, his future mentor, Thomas Carlyle, was corresponding with individuals about their Cromwell letters and asking for information on the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. He was also keeping friends and family informed by letter about the agonies of editing and writing, as he wrestled with the difficulty of making Oliver Cromwell ‘legible’ to a modern audience. Meanwhile he seemed to be oblivious to the fact that his infatuation with a wealthy aristocratic woman was driving his wife Jane towards nervous collapse. In a letter of 17 April 1845, Jane Welsh Carlyle, famed for her wit and kindliness as an informal literary hostess and for her brilliance as a letter-writer, shared her agony with her own family in Scotland. She told John Forster that her husband was ‘too much occupied with the Dead just now to bestow a moment on the Living’. The emotional crisis Jane experienced that month proved to be the turning point in a protracted drama within her marriage, which played out between 1844 and 1846. At the heart of that drama lay conflicting ideas relating to life and death, both in reality and symbolically.