Social and Cultural History (15th to 20th centuries)

The history of culture examines changing practices, values, discourses and mentalities, contested or shared, through the texts, images and objects which are the sources of their expression. Culture is conceived in its broadest sense, including patterns of everyday life and specialised or privileged systems of thought and expression.

All are examined in the framework of the cultural and educational institutions devoted to the transmission and organisation of knowledge. These include bodies such as the family, voluntary associations, schools and academies, the church, the court and the state as well as the media of oral transmission, the printed word, the graphic image and symbolic objects. Cultural history examines cultural practices as means of sustaining authority, establishing power and identity and asserting difference or distinction.

HEC has expertise in the areas of the nobility and social elites; court society; migration; minorities and diasporas; identity formation; memory; social networks; inter-cultural communications. These issues are studied in a comparative and trans-national perspective to overcome the localism associated with much of the work undertaken in this field.

A key aspect of this theme is the study of family history and gender history, including kin networks and households, in different European contexts from the 15th to the 19th century. This involves an examination of the role of laws in shaping domestic life, gender identities and family bonds, shedding light on the experiences and mutual relationships of authority and dependence in the lives of men and women, illuminating gendered languages of agency. The focus is on the construction of the European gendered self in relation to non-Western others, taking account of differences among different areas of Europe. Attention is given to marriage and family customs and iconography, as well as an anthropological approach to the study of gender identities.

We introduce gender into the study of courts and court systems in early modern Europe and explore the language of sovereignty as a process with gendered legal and institutional implications, which in turn affect the construction of a public legal sphere of practice and discourse. This highlights styles of government and the symbolic imagery connected to dynastic functions and family roles, including informal relations, networks of support and patronage, sociability, ostentation and ritual, all of which contributed to a refashioning of political discourse. 

Professors with a research interest in this area are Giulia Calvi , Diogo Ramada Curto , Anthony Molho  and Bartolome Yun-Casalilla