Blood and Kinship Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present [Hardcover]

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.

Bernhard Jussenhas 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 includeSpiritual Kinship as Social Practice(2000) andAtlas des Historischen Bildwissens(2009).

Blood & Kinshipis an important contribution to the anthropology of kinship, by providing significant analyses of how kinship in Europe has been understood distinctly through time, incorporating blood as metaphor in different ways.? Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

The collection of essays is a welcome contribution not only to the so-called New Kinship Studies, but also to the history of the substance of blood.? H-Soz-Kult

This is a book of astonishing quality, comprising a wealth of outstanding studies that underline the various shifts and mutations that took place mostly in the late medieval and late modern periods. It is true that issues of gender could play a more prevalent role and that discourses and semantic issues are largely privileged over visual matters, cultural practices, and material culture, but rather than a critique this is an invitation for furtl#