Table of content: https://www.rivisteweb.it/issn/0301-6307  

Over the past twenty years, historical kinship research has opened up numerous new perspectives: with regard to kinship as a concept and practice, to chronologies and transitions between differing logics of kinship, to kinship positions, configurations, and spaces, to kinship as a network of relationships and as an arena of conflict, and not least to kinship as a category of inclusion and exclusion. In this key topic area, a fundamental question is: who was actually included when it came to defining kinship?

In past centuries, as still today, belonging was neither a fixed quantity or quality nor a permanent status, but much rather situational and depending on particular social and/or legal contexts. Belonging had to be repeatedly updated and renewed – and the perception of belonging could vary between those who defined it and those who claimed it.

The special issue "Open kinship?" aims at considering some crucial aspects of belonging in the context of kinship. In this volume, contributions from social history and gender history convene and gain new impetus in their examination of kinship-related topics. Furthermore, in all the essays of "Open kinship?", special attention is devoted to legal practices and juridical explanations of belonging, inclusion and, of course, exclusion in a temporal span extending from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century.