OUP is publishing a book on the history
of young people's intimacy, based on legal records from the city of Lyon during
the Ancien Régime.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Our ideas about the long
histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their
reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual
double standard.
In Sex in an Old Regime City,
Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's
intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the
relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred,
even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these
occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of
strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they
could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to
make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to
local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the
resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses,
landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered
pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with
their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive
consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work;
those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that
the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term
costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and
consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide.
This richly textured study
re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power
were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular
institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Hardwick is the John E.
Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the
author of Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of
Daily Life in Seventeenth-Century France (OUP, 2009) and The
Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early
Modern France.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction A Foundling's Garter
and the World of Young People's Intimacy
Ch.. 1. Sourcing Intimate
Histories: The Social World of Young Workers
Ch. 2. Peril Stories: Licit
Intimacy, Space, and Community Safeguarding
Ch. 3. Holding Men Responsible:
Fertility, Community, and Court
Ch. 4. "Remedies" and
Remedies: Managing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy
Ch. 5. Intimate Labor: Paid Work
and an Intimate Economy of Reproduction
Ch. 6. Foundlings and Makeshift
Coffins: Community Complicity and Dead Babies
Conclusion: The End of the Old
Regime?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
