Sexuality, Illegitimacy, and Family in the Hispanic World: 1476-1800

FAIN: FA-50538-04

Ann Twinam
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

I apply for funding to write a monograph entitled "Sexuality, Illegitimacy, and Family in the Hispanic World: 1476-1800." This work rests on a unique source for Spanish, American, and European social history: an unbroken chain of thousands of Spanish petitions and royal decrees granting legitimations from 1476-1800. No other European or American archival source provides such a chronological sweep permitting a systematic exploration of gender relations, sexual mores, and illegitimacy from the late Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. The monograph will address three themes linked to established historiographies: 1) it will contextualize long term changes in sexual mores, illegitimacy, and marriage practices before and after the Catholic Council of Trent (1546-63), which established marriage as they solely accepted commitment between sexual partners. 2) It will locate Spanish trends within Mediterranean, European, and American patters during the Eighteenth Century, the "Century of Illegitimacy." 3) It will provide a trans-Atlantic perspective, directly contrasting patters of gender relations, sexuality, and illegitimacy between empire and colony, and between the old word and the new. The thematic and chronological sweep of this monograph will permit exploration of formative social processes that shaped state activism, gender relations, and family structure in the construction of the Western World.