Family Obligations and Inequalities in Access to Care in Northern Italy, Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Reconsidering the southern Europe model: Dowry, women's work and marriage patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the 18th century)

“…Nevertheless, scholars supporting these theses limited their observations to specific regions, such as the South of Italy ("the deep south"); in addition they were obliged to admit numerous exceptions and never to clarify the real extent and the limits of applicability of this model. Thus, it appears that the "Mediterranean model" is not appropriate for describing the great regional variability of marriage and family patterns in southern Europe where, according to studies of the last two decades, factors can acquire different configurations and change rapidly across the regions and from city to countryside (Barbagli, 1991;Cavallo, 1998Cavallo, , 2006Kertzer, 1991;Kertzer & Brettell, 1987;Viazzo, 2003). Also the longue durée of the model across the centuries and up to the present day proposed by Reher (2004) seems not to hold true in face of the great variation in contexts.…”

Introduction

“…Did middling people recognise the importance of an economy of makeshifts and go out of their way to create extra strands to this economy, as they did for instance in Italy? 61 In contrast to that on the continent, the English historiography provides only partial and limited answers to these important questions for the central period (1700-1850) covered by this book. 62 The limitations and complexities of the source base available to the English welfare historian goes some way to explaining this situation.…”

Life-cycle service and family systems in the rural countryside: a lesson from historical East-Central Europe

“…The implication is that complex families (believed to dominate in the Eastern and Mediterranean part of Europe) had functioned as "private institutions" to redistribute the poverty of nuclear families with the aid of the benefits of the kinship system, and also as a locus for risk-sharing. According to this widely held view (for criticism, see Cavallo, 1998;Horden, 1998;Bengtsson, Campbell and Lee 2004), joint family systems were generally better prepared to escape life cycle induced poverty, because in such systems peasant families held to a multiple family structure for the most part of their developmental cycle (Czap, 1982, 18;Czap, 1983, 143-144;Nosevich, 2002). Extended households, due to relatively larger labor forces, often had the potential for superior economic performance as indicated by their productive capacity (Reyna, 1976).…”

“…Hypotheses about the historical functions of the household in various parts of Europe may be developed through an examination of the macro-regional family and marriage patterns posited by Hajnal and Laslett in correspondance with contrasting systems of labor organization, welfare provision, and family well-being (Hajnal, 1983;Laslett, 1983;Laslett, 1988b;Schofield, 1989;Oris and Ochiai, 2002; see also discussion in Cavallo, 1998;Horden, 1998;Viazzo, 1994). In England and possibly also in other north-western European areas where neo-local family formation practices prevailed, the contribution of coresident non-conjugal kin to familial work force was negligible, collective provisions were often called upon to shield needy individuals, and life-cycle service provided "a quasi-familial remedy" for labor shortages caused by unfavourable stages of nuclear household family life cycles (Laslett, 1988b).…”