Blood and Kinship: Matter and Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present

The word “blood” awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

Christopher H. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of History at Wayne State University. A National Book Award nominee and Guggenheim Fellow, his publications include The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920: The Politics of De-Industrialization (1995).

Bernhard Jussen has been Professor of Medieval History at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2008. In 2007 he was awarded the Leibniz prize of the German Research Foundation. His publications include Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice (2000) and Atlas des Historischen Bildwissens (2009).

David Warren Sabean is Henry J. Bruman Professor of German History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (1998).

Simon Teuscher is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Zurich. His publications include Lord's Rights and Peasant Stories. Writing and the Formation of Tradition in the Later Middle Ages (2012).