Stepfamilies across Europe and Overseas, 1550–1900

Lyndan Warner is Full Professor in the Department of History at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Canada. Her research spans the disciplines of the history of the family, law, and visual culture in the early modern period. She is Burghley Visiting Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge in Michaelmas 2024. Gabriella Erdélyi is Senior Research Fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities (HUN-REN RCH), Institute of History, Budapest. Erdélyi’s ‘Integrating Families’, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Momentum project 2017-2022, explored stepfamily dynamics in East Central Europe. She is editor of the series ‘Hungarian Family Histories: Studies’ and co-editor of the Hungarian Historical Review.

Introduction: Stepfamilies across Europe and overseas, 1550–1900 1. Influence of parental death on child mortality and the phenomenon of the stepfamily in western Bohemia in 1708–1834 2. Parental loss in 18th–19th century Hungary: the impact of the parents’ widowhood and remarriage on their children’s survival, Zsámbék, 1720–1850 3. Stepfamilies, inheritance, and living arrangements in a rural society of Germany 4. Remarriage and stepfamilies in the ‘Western Islands’ of Europe: the rural Azores of Portugal in the 18th and 19th centuries 5. The invisibility of Portuguese stepfamilies: the relationships between stepparents, stepchildren and half-siblings in eighteenth– and nineteenth–century Porto 6. Changing patterns of hierarchy within Swedish stepfamilies in the late 1700s 7. Stepmothers and stepdaughters in early modern Florence 8. Restrained freedom? Widows, blended families and inheritance in eighteenth-century urban Sri Lanka Epilogue: A visual approach to stepfamilies