Abstract
When the history of the European pre-industrial family first began to attract significant scholarly attention in the 1970s and 80s, absent from much of the ensuing literature were discussions about how stepfamilies fit into the equation. When step-relationships were discussed, they were typically confined to comparisons of rates of remarriage for widows and widowers. Perhaps, the abundance of research into the family dating from this period has led later scholars to assume, erroneously, that the topic had already been handled in the existing literature. Another explanation for the oversight may be the difficulty of actually pinpointing stepfamily relationships. Determining whether familial relationships were consanguineous or affinal can range from difficult to impossible. Happy blended families might simply refer to one another as ‘kin’ or ‘relation’ – language that would prevent the historian from understanding how those bonds were formed. To uncover the historical stepfamily therefore can be quite an undertaking.
Two historians who have accepted this challenge are Lyndan Warner and Gabriella Erdélyi. Warner has previously published an edited collection on stepfamilies in Western and Central Europe, while Erdélyi led the Hungarian Academy of Sciences-funded Integrating Families: Children and the Stepfamily in the Kingdom of Hungary (16–19th Centuries) project which uncovered the experiences of pre-industrial stepfamilies in Central and Eastern Europe. Their expertise on the subject, alongside their geographical specialties, is combined in their co-edited collection, Stepfamilies Across Europe and Overseas, 1550–1900. This edited collection (originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family) evolved from a number of European conferences on the same themes between 2019 and 2022. Its aim is ambitious, seeking to investigate “historical demography, remarriage patterns and emotional attachments of stepfamilies in Europe and some of the territories in the colonial world” (1). The collection studies these themes by focusing on “the sequence of events creating a stepfamily in the premodern to early industrial era” (3). The circumstances, life-cycle moments, and relationships it considers are wide-ranging, including the effects of parental loss, remarriage, caregiving, and inheritance on biological and stepparents and children and half-siblings. Particularly groundbreaking is the exploration of illegitimate children who became stepchildren and siblings.
The book is split in half; the first four chapters primarily employing a historical demographic approach and the second four undertaking a more qualitative analysis. Alice Velková and Petr Tureček begin the edited collection with their study on the influence of parental death and stepfamily formation on child mortality in western Bohemia between 1708 and 1834, using family reconstitution from parish registers. Their research agrees with previous findings that losing a mother was more detrimental than losing a father, and that a child was most at risk to die should they lose their biological parent in the first year of their life. In contrast, Velková and Tureček found that while both stepmothers and stepfathers had a positive impact on a child's survival, a stepfather's presence was statistically more impactful, suggesting that “it was not as much the biological ties that determined the child's survival as the fact that it was raised in a complete family, whose economic security allowed the mother to provide her children with all the necessary care” (39). Péter Őri's chapter interrogates similar questions in considering a family reconstitution database of the Roman Catholic German settlement of Zsámbék in Hungary, but also considers the presence of step- and half-siblings and birth order on survival. While likewise noting the detrimental effect of parental loss on a child's mortality, Őri finds that, overall, “both stepmothers and stepfathers appear to have been neutral concerning stepchildren's survival” (63). More specifically, however, never-before-married stepmothers were more likely to have a positive impact on a stepchild's outcome than a previously-widowed stepmother with children. Őri attributes this difference not to any “Cinderella effect,” but rather possible competition between biological and stepchildren, “where [parents] sometimes had to choose and prefer some of them to the others” (64). To this reviewer, the distinction between these two theories is not clear and could have been reflected upon more extensively.
The collection travels to the rural northwestern German parish of Belm next, for Jürgen Schlumbohm's exploration of stepfamilies, inheritance, and living arrangements from 1650 to 1860. Schlumbohm studies how stepfamilies operated and disputed within a legal system where property was impartible and the youngest son was the preferred heir. His research reveals that stepparents and children frequently preferred to live and work separately, but that, equally, property inheritance disputes were also common between biological relations. Considered next by Paulo Teodoro de Matos and Diogo Paiva is the experience of stepfamilies in the rural parishes of the Portuguese Azores in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an archipelago from which male emigration to the Americas was high, but so too were rates of widow remarriage. Their analysis of parish records reveals that “the duration of stepfamilies was somewhat lower than that of other families,” as older children and those who had lost their mother were more likely to leave the parish upon their parent's remarriage (105). Most interestingly, Matos and Paiva uncover that a significant number of families were comprised of single mothers who married men who were not the biological father of their child(ren). They conclude that the high rates of remarriage, along with the prevalence of illegitimate births to widows, must reflect a “cultural norm” and “social tolerance” which merits greater scholarly scrutiny (105).
The book then shifts to chapters which take a more qualitative approach. First, Ana Mafalda Lopes studies the relationship between stepparents, stepchildren, and half-siblings in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Porto. Using a variety of legal and parish records, she argues that Portuguese stepfamilies had “less of a tendency to live together and create strong relationships” due to high mobility into and out of the urban environment and a hostile legal attitude towards remarriage (113). Children were more likely to be placed in religious institutions, marry, or emigrate than remain in a newly-created marital household. Despite this relative paucity of cohabitation, Mafalda Lopes contends that more can be learned about Porto's stepfamilies during this period from wills, which reveal step-relations inheriting property. Relationships between stepfamily members, she argues, were “more strongly shaped by properties and their distribution rather than emotional bonds evolving during years of co-residence” (129). Bonnie Clementsson's chapter considers applications for marriage licenses from couples already kin by marriage to the Swedish crown as a lens through which to investigate hierarchy and the stepfamily during the eighteenth century. During this period, Sweden had strict incest prohibitions, which were particularly harsh against couples related in a lineal degree, such as a stepparent-stepchild relationship, “due to cultural notions about hierarchy within families” (139). Clementsson explores the arguments used by hopeful couples in their applications, which were both practical and emotional and did not show “much concern about the hierarchies within families” (156). Applicants instead stressed that a spouse that was already kin “would feel more affection for the children compared to a stranger” (156).
The last two chapters focus on case studies of specific stepfamily relationships. Megan Moran draws on correspondence and account books to study the relationships between stepmothers and stepdaughters in early modern Florence. Her chapter studies how “the figure of the stepmother acted as another link in the extended female networks of family life”, even after the death of the father and husband who had first created the stepmother-stepdaughter relationship (179). A particular strength of this chapter is breadth of correspondents considers, which allows for a more holistic view of the relationships of these stepfamilies and a comparison of letters to consanguineous versus affinal kin. Moran concludes that “female networks […] embraced the kinship bonds created by stepfamilies and blended households” which “suggest a more inclusive definition of the premodern family that moved beyond the patrilline” (167). The final chapter, written by Dries Lyna, is a case study of the legal battle between a widowed Sinhalese stepmother, Donna Cecilia, and her Chettie in-laws and stepchildren in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka. Donna Cecilia was fighting for her share of inheritance from her first husband, while his children argued that she had forfeited her portion of the will by giving birth to an illegitimate child. Ultimately, the stepchildren prevailed in the colonial Dutch courts in which the case was argued. The case of Donna Cecilia unveils the complexity of “stepmothers’ socio-legal position in cross-cultural colonial settings,” where local customs needed to be balanced with the Roman-Dutch legal system (200). Lyna argues that, due to the legal context, “the relationship between previous-marriage children and stepmothers therefore had to be optimal before the father of the house passed away” for a frictionless relationship between stepmothers and stepchildren to exist after the death of the husband and father (201). Finally, in an epilogue, Warner considers future sources of evidence for the study of stepfamilies: visual and material culture. She argues, after studying two early modern paintings, that studying stepfamilies in portraiture “works in tandem with historical demography and a whole range of primary sources to understand the challenges these complex families faced across Europe and into its widening world” (215).
Warner and Erdélyi write that the book “explores the cleavages as well as similarities in stepfamilies” (1). It is the cleavages, rather than the similarities, that are most apparent when reading the edited collection. The most striking similarity, when appraising the book as a whole, is the vital importance of the local legal system to the functioning and attachment of the pre-industrial stepfamily. Almost all chapters dedicate space to discussing the legal position on remarriage, widowhood, and inheritance. Whether stepfamily relations were close or distant seems to have often hinged on whether the law favored stepfamily relationships. However, this reviewer cannot help but wonder whether the concentration in many of the chapters — particularly those of a more qualitative nature — on legal sources might skew conclusions towards this opinion. It is interesting to note that, arguably, the most caring and loving stepfamily relationships are found in the letters studied in Moran's chapter on early modern Florence, despite the fact that “from a legal perspective, stepmothers complicated inheritance patterns” (167). Whether strictly legal documents properly reflect emotional realities is therefore questionable. Although this review has already noted the difficulty in discovering step-relationships in the archive, moving away from quasi-legal histories and turning to new types of sources — as proposed by Warner in her epilogue — may not only uncover new ways of understanding the pre-industrial stepfamily. It might also reveal more emotional commonalities in the stepfamily experience in the pre-modern world.
Overall, this collection is an excellent contribution to the field of family history, especially in its geographical diversity. It covers many geographical regions not often considered in Anglosphere historiography. Its chapters successfully consider the stepfamily at both the macro and the micro level, and demonstrate that quantitative and qualitative analyses of pre-industrial step relations are possible and persuasive. While a shift away from legal and parish sources would be appreciated for future research that is only because this collection has done such an excellent job at showing their richness. Stepfamilies Across Europe and Overseas would be a notable addition to the library of any historian of the family, especially those with an interest in legal history.
