Seeing Stepfamilies in the Past
This seminar will focus on a collaborative book project using material and visual culture to study commissioned artworks portraying families and everyday objects made by family members to consider who counted as part of the family and to see the cumulative, blended family in sequence through each wedding, birth, death, and remarriage. Widowers, widows, sons and daughters left traces of their emotional attachments, social and kinship networks in commissioned group portraits, sculpted reliefs on tombstones, painted epitaphs, tapestries, homemade embroidery and glass. For example, a deceased first wife, her children, including the dead, swaddled newborns or the older children who succumbed to illness–often appeared side-by-side in an invented scene with second and occasionally third wives and the children of these later marriages. Stepparents and half-siblings were thus frequently portrayed in monuments inside churches or on the exteriors of cathedrals in town squares across Europe visible to all passers-by. An overarching aim of this book will be to ‘see’ or reveal stepfamilies that have become invisible to us. While I can show an array of portrayals from Europe and its (former) colonies, for the Social History of Capitalism seminar, I can highlight particular examples from among the burghers of Europe.
Seeing Stepfamilies in the Past seeks to recapture perceptions of the family in past centuries and to reveal portrayals of stepfamilies that are hiding in plain sight. The idea of ‘seeing’ was, in part, inspired by economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie’s research. Influenced by anthropological methods, she compiled both qualitative and quantitative ‘observations’ in late medieval to early modern guild records (Ogilvie, 2019). Her team scoured secondary sources on guilds to record references to qualitative actions such as holding meetings or restricting membership and quantitative observations such as numbers of guild members or percentages of women. In her Gender & Work project, Maria Ågren has adopted a similar approach with her ‘verb-oriented method’ – to record any verb describing women & men at work in court records, diaries, and petitions. Both projects have made their data available online and that is one of the aims of this project to compile, map and show the patterns of stepfamily portrayals. If we begin to look, we see.