MacKay Lecture Series

2006-07 

 

The Early Modern Family 

The family has been integral to social and political life throughout the centuries.  Whom a family consists of and the particular roles the family plays have, however, changed over time and differed from place to place.  Despite the common tendency to reify "the family" as an apolitical, ahistorical entity with a given shape and purpose, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have shown it to be anything but neutral and unchanging.  As both a form of association and a metaphor for political institutions, "the family" has had many meanings.  This set of lectures is designed to examine some of these meanings, focusing on the significance of the family in a period recognized as transitional by historians, literary scholars, and sociologists alike.

 

Lecture One:  The Mackay History Lecture

"'The Sweet Metaphysics of Love': Marriage, Divorce, and Gender Politics in the French Revolution"

Suzanne Desan, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor Desan’s work has focused on revolutionary France, with particular emphases on familial, gender, and popular politics.  Her most recent book, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (2004), offers a groundbreaking study of the ways in which the revolution reshaped the most intimate of relationships, in part by remodelling laws on divorce, illegitimacy, and inheritance.  Her first book, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (1990) won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams prize for the best first book in European history.  Professor Desan’s other awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations.

 

Lecture Two

"Paternity and Hegemony in Early Modern Europe"

Julia P. Adams, Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Lecture Three 

"A Merchant Family in Tudor London: Alice Barnham and her Three Sons" 

Lena Cowen Orlin, Professor of English,University of Maryland 

Thursday, March 22, 2007, 8 pm; Scotiabank Auditorium 

Professor Orlin is the Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, and formerly the Executive Director of the Folger Institute.  She has co-authored Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (2003), edited Material London, c. 1600 (2000), and published Elizabethan Households (1995) and Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (1994). Her awards include grants from the John Simon Guggenhiem Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities, as well as residential fellowships at such places as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Centre.

 

Lecture Four 

"Crucifixion, Slavery, and Death: A Cultural History of 'Family' in Colonial New Mexico" 

Ràmon Gutiérrez, Professor of Ethnic Studies and History, UC San Diego