Domestic Strategies
Work and Family in France and Italy, 1600–1800

This 1991 book offers an important perspective on the working lives of European families during the early modern period and beyond.

Stuart Woolf (Edited by)

9780521391641, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 February 1991

218 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.49 kg

"[T]hose interested in families' strategies towards work and social institutions--whether guilds, charitable organizations, or municipal authorities--will find much good material in this volume." Judy Coffin, Journal of Economic History

Research on historical processes such as commercialisation traditionally concentrated on the motors of change and measurement of their impact, and considered the labouring classes as the passive objects of such changes. Developments in the social sciences in recent years have stimulated a new reading of the historical sources in terms of the social relations and strategies of families in interpreting and adapting to their own use institutional settings and economic resources. The essays presented in this 1991 book explore the relationship between the historical experiences of social relations and the demands and opportunities offered by the economy in early modern Europe through a focus on the strategies of labouring families. Critical discussion of the historian's use of sources characterises the essays, which provide case-studies of social groups in north-central Italy and the French Alps. They relate to three specific themes: the exploitation of non-agricultural resources in the countryside, urban guilds and charitable provision.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction Stuart Woolf
2. Social relations and control of resources in an area of transit: eastern Liguria, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries Osvaldo Raggio
3. Family cycles, peddling and society in upper Alpine valleys in the eighteenth century Laurence Fontaine
4. Local market rules and practices. Three guilds in the same line of production in early modern Bologna Carlo Poni
5. Group strategies and trade strategies: the Turin tailors' guild in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Simona Cerutti
6. Conceptions of poverty and poor-relief in Turin in the second half of the eighteenth century Sandra Cavallo
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB]