The Lithuanian Family in its European Context, 1800-1914: Marriage, Divorce and Flexible Communities

by Dalia Leinarte

Overview

This book investigates marriage and divorce in the nineteenth-century European territories of the Russian Empire. It uncovers the way a peasant community employed unsanctioned marital behaviour, such as cohabitation and bigamy, among others, in order to respond to the external factors that had an impact on the family life, including transmission of inheritance and household structure. Lithuania was part of the Tsarist Empire until 1914. This case study reveals how under often restrictive laws and policies – serfdom up to 1861, and the pervasive role of the Church, in addition to deep-rooted customary practices – women and men manage to normalize their family life. The volume is based on a wide range of archival sources and uncovers familial behaviour both from an individual and community perspectives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319845616
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/18/2018
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dalia Leinarte is Professor of History at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania, and a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, UK. She is a Chairperson of the UN CEDAW Committee. Leinarte is the author of Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–1970.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction.- Chapter Two: Marriage, Family, Love.- Chapter Three: Divorce and Separation.- Bibliography.- Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Leinarte’s book…is a pioneering effort to structure a very complex data set of primary sources… dealing with family, marriage, divorce, and related topics. In western scholarship, the field of “family history” (inclusively defined) has been a standard part of social-history research since the 1960s, but not so in or about the Baltic region. The inherent complexity of the project ensures a long shelf-life for the book: Leinarte has no competitors in this field in the Lithuanian profession, and this is true also among western researchers.” (Andrejs Plakans, Iowa State University, USA)

Editorial Reviews

This book was awarded the AABS Book Prize Honorable Mention 2018 by The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS).

“In its consideration of this book, the committee described it as “distinguished by the methodological diversity. [Parts of the book] present a microscopic view evaluating the subjective range of motives and perceptions of intelligentsia or peasants. At the same time, quantitative data and structural analyses are present…reconstructing long-term developmental tendencies.”” (AABS The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, aabs-balticstudies.org, August 12, 2018)

“By using an exhaustive number of studies by eastern and western European scholars, she has updated and given the Lithuanian family a place on a spectrum of the stereotypically progressive Western, and the backward Eastern, European family. … The substance and originality of this work are important for scholars engaged in comparative studies … . This work will no doubt remain the definitive work on the Lithuanian family of the nineteenth and early twentieth century for a long time.” (Virgil I. Krapauskas, Journal of Baltic Studies, Vol. 49 (03), July, 2018)

From the Publisher