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Practice of Patriarchy examines the lives of notaries and their
families in the French city of Nantes during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Making creative use of judicial and notarial records, Julie
Hardwick brings to life a little-known aspect of early modern culture:
the daily experience of middling urban families—from work to family
to neighborhood to involvement in local politics.
Hardwick explores the unique position of notaries as recorders
and orderers of the hierarchies of daily life. Notaries functioned
as a nexus where the political, legal, social, and economic met.
They mediated between state and subject, between literate and oral
cultures, between borrowers and lenders, and between men and women.
For middling urban families such as these, gender and household
relations were at the heart of their own personal lives as well
as their public actions. From the work of notaries, to household
and kin relations, to local networks of credit and sociability,
to public life and political culture, Hardwick delineates the complex
hierarchies through which men and women defined their roles, their
families, and their communities. The Practice of Patriarchy is ideal for courses in women's history and early modern European
history. |
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