All in the Family
Childhood and Fictive Kinship in Roman Society
The development of fictive kinship around young Roman children
Description
Gaia Gianni’s All in the Family explores how children shaped the development of pseudo-familial bonds, or fictive kinship, in Roman society during the early imperial period. Previous scholarship on the Roman family has primarily emphasized the patriarchal and nuclear structure of the Roman family, with children often represented as passive actors in a vacuum. Believing this to be an oversimplification of how the Roman family functioned, Gianni in her study focuses on the ways in which Roman families raised children and formed long-term relationships with individuals outside of the nuclear family, such as friends, neighbors, nurses, and caretakers, who gradually became full-fledged members of the family unit. Through a wide variety of literary works, legal documents, and funerary epitaphs for children set up by their families and caregivers, Gianni borrows from modern sociological and anthropological theories to argue that children acted as catalysts or connecting nodes in the creation of fictive kinship with individuals who were not part of the biologically determined family. In addition to illuminating the roles and experiences of these figures, All in the Family reveals how this social network was integrated into the family both in practice and in ideology, presenting a more complex view of the Roman family than the traditional nuclear structure.
Gaia Gianni is Assistant Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University.
Reviews
“Gianni’s All in the Family illuminates the roles of wet nurses, male caregivers, and enslaved children, through which she offers a satisfyingly more complex view of the Roman family while also challenging and refining our picture of Roman sexuality and gender norms. This book makes accessible a corpus of fascinating but unfamiliar texts. Gianni’s assemblage of the corpus and translations are valuable, and more so with her nuanced interpretations.”
- Cynthia Bannon, Indiana University
“Gianni’s close, critical recognition of the importance inherent in all categories of pertinent evidence establishes clearly articulated principles for new interpretations and re-evaluations of previous historical studies of infancy and childhood in the Roman Mediterranean. As a nuanced, deceptively sophisticated exploration of a historical reality configured as an examination of the mentalité of the ancient Roman and an important critique of modern scholarly constructs, Gianni’s All in the Family will contribute significantly to Roman infancy and childhood studies.”
- Peter Keegan, Macquarie University, Sydney
“While others talk agency, Gaia Gianni gives agency to individuals who are seldom put in the picture. Her truly accurate, engaging, and highly learned approach to inscriptions uncovers the multifaceted reality of families in the Roman world, with clarity and insight. A masterpiece of Roman social history.”
- Christian Laes, University of Manchester
“Gianni offers a new compilation and analysis of texts about children from the first to the third centuries CE. She illuminates the fluid ways Romans incorporated enslaved children and others not biologically or legally connected within fictive (i.e., socially invented) but meaningful family units. Summing up: Recommended."
- S. Brown, Choice
“In a valuable contribution to Roman family history, Gaia Gianni explores in her monograph the social relationships of three categories of individuals attested by sepulchral inscriptions…Her analysis of the epitaphs concerned is meticulous, and while alert throughout to their intractability and partiality (in every sense), she urges the distinctive point that children themselves were the catalysts for promoting the enduring familial bonds she detects in her evidence.”
- Keith Bradley, sehepunkte