Preliminary Programme

As it is known, the liberal codifications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reduced – especially in Italy - inequalities between men and women and established less discriminating rules as concerns the transmission of property between sons and daughters.
As a consequence, it is interesting to go over the other criteria adopted to re-establish differences in roles and wealth inside the family. To this end, the fathers’ last wills and testaments are important and relatively neglected sources in the contemporary age.
In twentieth century wills, inequalities emerge again not so much in the distribution of goods and properties as through other markers of power. The reasons that govern the transmission of objects become here much more relevant, especially in the case of cultural heritage. So, in the wills we find different advices as regards not only the education of sons and daughters, but also the transmission of books when family libraries were split up among them. Books often become the main instrument to consciously produce heavy contrasts in the process of inheritance. As a result, in contemporary Italian society, different cultural and political roles and commitments are defined and attributed to men and women. (Show less)

The connection between the figure of the father and the political power is well known to monarchical societies of early modern Europe. And this connection keeps influencing political discourses and practices in 19th century Europe. But the transformation of political conceptions, and particularly the refounding of the public sphere around the national discourse, which is occurring at the beginning of the 19th century, changes the profile of the metaphor. As the national community is considered something like a real parental community, the image of the founding father becomes, at the same time, both a metaphorical representation and a real description of the sound «biological» nexus between leader and people. Even though this new conception is not without strains, it influences significantly the way of conceptualizing political leadership both at the end of the 19th century and in first half of the 20th. (Show less)

1. According to legal tradition of Roman Antiquity, a father had a ius occidendi which entitled him to kill his adulterous daughter. This was understood as one expression of patria potestas, the paramount, comprehensive power of the Roman paterfamilias over the members of his familia. The patria potestas had its core in the ius vitae necisque, which is usually associated with the father’s choice to accept his newborn child or to abandon it. The ius vitae necisque had also been exercised to sanction perpetrations against pudicitia, the Roman code of women’s sexual discipline. Writers tell us that the paterfamilias when exerting his jurisdiction would seek the assistance of a consilium, in particular when a grave incident such as adultery of female member of the family was the issue.
2. Normally, the law reflects the values of its society. These values, however, are not automatically in harmony. If a social constellation touches more than one value and if the respective values compete, society must work out a hierarchy and decide the value to prevail in the corresponding legal provision. To create a stable and coherent societal order, the legal provisions must homogenously relate to one another, reflecting consistently why certain values are endorsed in certain situations and why they are superseded in other situations.
With respect to the Roman father’s right to kill his adulterous daughter, two features seem quite obvious: First, there must be some deeply felt concern in Roman society that overrides the commandment “killing another person is not allowed”; second, we can assume that the Roman code of women’s decency, their pudicitia, is of serious importance.
3. Emperor Augustus encroached on the traditional Roman patria potestas when he made adultery cases to be tried before regular criminal courts (quaestiones). At the same time, the lex Iulia de adulteriis provides in its section 2 the Roman father’s right to kill his adulterous daughter, thus putting this ius occidendi on a statutory basis.
By transferring adultery cases to the public system of criminal justice, Augustus shifted the control of women’s pudicitia from the families significantly to the public sphere. By doing so, he apparently strived for a compromise between the traditional pater familias jurisdiction and the new criminal law. At the same time, creating a new rivalling jurisdiction in adultery cases put the traditional ius occidendi of the pater familias into perspective.
What was the strategy behind Augustus’ changes and in what respects did they affect the power of the fathers? If Augustus had considered it feasible and important to abolish the jurisdictional role of the pater familias totally he would probably have done so. Yet he must have had motives to refrain from completely abolishing the pater familias-competence. The paper explores whether his decisive motives were of pragmatic nature – to avoid an overly daring and thus politically destabilizing innovation – or whether he pursued an idea of confirming patria potestas, at least in some modified form. (Show less)

The relationship between father and son in the early modern period has been conceptualised exclusively in terms of submission of the latter to the authority of the former, moreover, it has been characterised as implying a one-way flow of obligations and resources running from the father to the son. This paper will reverse this usual perspective and show that the legal institution of patria potestas also entailed a son’s economic obligation to his father, for it gave fathers full rights over the earnings of their grown-up sons. It was to escape this burden that many adult men, sometimes married and fathers in their own right, resorted to the legal deed of emancipation, which freed them from the patria potestas of their living father and hence from any economic obligations to his family.
The analysis of a sample of over a hundred deeds from the last quarter of the 17th century reveals that emancipations were particularly frequent among those urban classes which largely lived of their work and participated in the labour market from an early age. The arguments used by sons to justify their request to be emancipated throws light on the specific nature of the father-son relationship among these groups. Fathers are often portrayed as too poor to comply with the duty of settling all male children in a trade and paying for the dowries of the daughters, and as obliged to rely on older sons to fulfil these essential paternal and masculine roles. They are implicitly depicted as failed patriarchs and their legal prerogatives over the son thus appear illegitimate.
The analysis of these narratives exposes the tension between the shared expectation that fathers should settle their male children in an occupation and the inability of many to offer anything beyond mere subsistence. This gap between interiorised ideals about fatherly roles and practice made the position of the paternal figure particularly vulnerable among the non-propertied classes. Here paternal roles were often shared by a range of male figures, rather than being entirely fulfilled by the biological father. Tensions or simply emotional and physical distance characterised the father-son relationship, in sheer contrast with the rhetoric of the time, which depicted such bond as “the greatest love there is”. (Show less)

Historical family research has emphasized that one of the characteristics of western societies in early modern times was – unlike in other cultures such as, for instance, Mediterranean cultures – the fact that the spouses were the centre of society. This implies that the couple was relatively independent from the parent generation and especially from the fathers. For men, marriage was about the latest point of time for becoming autonomous and gaining independence from the father. To become master in a craft or trade was – at least in certain areas - generally tied to getting married. These were important parameters that defined a man’s full social-legal citizenship.
But this was not the only existing pattern. At least among farmers one can find that the father – more often than has so far been presumed – exerted his power even over a married son as long as the latter lived under the same roof.
The central issue of this paper focuses on the following question: According to what rules were internal power relations among the different generations within one and the same household organized? This question can be answered by analysing marriage contracts. As can be shown by different examples from Tyrolean courts from the second half of the eighteenth century, some fathers insisted on exercising unlimited authority over sons who married and lived with their wives in the father’s house while others would not give up certain rights over their sons. – But there are, of course, also fathers who, to a great extent, gave up their leading position. Marriage contracts with sons-in-law were even more carefully stipulated than those with sons. The former was obviously considered to be a most fragile constellation. In this context, the society under investigation appears to have been defined strongly by a (patri-)lineal logic and by the power and authority of fathers-in-law.
The paper finally discusses the changes that took place at the transition of the Ancien Régime to the modern period. (Show less)