Description: Domestic Strategies offers a new reading of the historical sources in order to understand the social relations and strategies of laboring families toward the organization of productive processes and institutional arrangements in early modern Europe. In contrast to many other works, the essays in Domestic Strategies place laboring families as the actors on the historical scene, rather than as passive recipients of historical changes. Conceptual insights derived from both anthropology (Sahlins and Geertz) and sociology (Bourdieu, Elias and Mary Douglas) are applied to individual case studies of social groups from north-central Italy and the French Alps, and the whole offers an important new perspective on the working lives of European families during the early modern period and beyond.
Review Quotes: "[T]hose interested in families' strategies towards work and social institutions--whether guilds, charitable organizations, or municipal authorities--will find much good material in this volume." Judy Coffin, Journal of Economic History