Preliminary Programme

The recent surge of interest for spiritual kinship should not bring us to limit our study to it, forgetting all other kinds of relationship (alliance, friendship, neighbourhood...), in much the same way as happened for marriage in the past.
The paper aims at describing the characteristics of the network of spiritual kinship found in the Italian city of Ivrea (years 1480-1620), pointing out both the very particular status of spiritual kinship, and the position it occupied in a more complex system of social alliances and contacts.
In the period, spiritual kinship underwent radical transformations because of the new rules imposed by the Council of Trent. In particular, the Council limited the number of godparents to two as a maximum (i.e. one godfather and one godmother). In places like Ivrea, where godparents used to be numerous, this caused profound tensions and a situation of social uncertainty, that led to a sensible shift in the position of spiritual kinship among the other kinds of relationship, and altered its very nature. In fact, spiritual kinship, that once created links between every level of the social ladder, became a more and more “vertical” relationship during XVI century.
The data I use comes from the “Eporedia” database (Eporedia is the Roman name of Ivrea), built from many kinds of source. In particular, parish registers of baptisms and marriages, available from fairly ancient times, allowed to reconstruct the networks of alliance by marriage and spiritual kinship for a big part of the total population. Data about friendship and neighbourhood relationships comes from other sources. (Show less)

The Gold Rush attracted thousands of French migrants to California. My paper will use the baptismal records of Notre Dame des Victoires, a French roman catholic church that was founded in San Francisco in 1856. From the lists of godfathers and godmothers, it will explore San Francisco French immigrants’ local and transatlantic networks and their evolution from 1856 to 1880. (Show less)

In this essays we try study the social network established from the spiritual kinship and the multiple mechanisms of relations through the family, the work, the patronage system, friendship and solidarity. The geographic space in that we are going to insert this investigation is Albacete, located in the Spanish Southern and a crossroad between the interior of the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean coast. This town supposes an excellent example of Mediterranean agrotowns characterized by an important population, but with structures socio-economic where the rural world is very important. This town undergoes a constant growth between 1750 and 1850, quadruplicating its initials population and getting to reach in the middle of century XIX the number of than 16000 becoming the capital of a province of recent creation more. This important growth has in the immigration of short route one of its main causes. On their base, great landowners, merchants and other members of the dominant elite will impose their power. The presence like godfathers, testamentary executors, its presence as witnesses in notarial documents or of another type corroborate the importance of the fictitious and spiritual kinship like key in their strategies of social reproduction and the extension of their relation and domination networks. (Show less)

This paper aims to compare the familial practices of baptisms in two great cities in the nineteenth century. One, Paris, is the heart of the revolutionnary tradition and the capitale of France, where, since 1792, baptisms is not a legal obligation for families. The other, Rome, until 1870, is the capitale of a catholic state by excellence. But, beyond great differences, we can see some common evolutions and the increase of some family logics against catholic theoretical rules. (Show less)