Read more
Sex in an Old Regime City is a major reframing of the long history of young people's intimacy. It shows how long- running problems like out-of-wedlock pregnancy were handled very differently in Old Regime France than in more recent centuries. Abortion, infanticide, broken hearts, and conflict with parents and neighbors were key challenges of young people's lives then as now but young couples' efforts to deal with these challenges were supported in pragmatic, often sympathetic, ways by their communities and institutions like local courts, clergy, legal officials, and social welfare managers.
List 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
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.
Additional text
In her impressive new book, Julie Hardwick provides a compelling account of young workers' intimate lives in Old Regime Lyon based on extensive and exacting archival research. With hermasterful command of the sources,Hardwick vividly illuminates working class heterosexual intimacy in this beautifully nuanced study.
