THE TIES THAT BIND: KINSHIP ASSOCIATION AND MARRIAGE IN THE ALBERTI FAMILY 1378-1428 (FLORENCE, ITALY)

There are two major themes in the dissertation. One is to illuminate the extent of voluntary and involuntary association among the blood kin and in-laws of the Alberti during the period of that family's political rise and fall in Florence from 1378 to 1428. The other is to document the particular importance of marriage, as the means whereby blood kin were produced and in-laws acquired, and to demonstrate through analysis of the Alberti family's political history, that all socio-political events should be analyzed in the context of familial and marriage connections. This study is, therefore, a history of an important Florentine family, the Alberti, and an examination of that family as a case study for extended family relations. Using material gathered in the Florentine State Archives and in the National Library in Florence, all aspect of the Alberti family and their relatives have been examined (household structure, business organization, marriage patterns, everyday contractual associations, political affiliations) with the purpose of demonstrating the integral interconnections of family relationships, kinship ties, marriage and the course of social and political interaction. Documentation of Alberti activity in all facets of life demonstrates that clan's continued embrace of its extended family (blood kin and in-laws alike) which incorporated a practical approach to the changing outside world. Where one set of traditional family associations withered or was abandoned for practical reasons, other attachments formed which, although less schematically organized, were nonetheless binding. In that sense, the family appears as a viable organism which did not shatter with blows to household and business structure but reshaped itself, reaching out, amoeba-like, to encompass other family bonds in compensation. These findings are not just to fuel the arguments for the 'extended family' side of the debate over the fate of the clan. They are also to demonstrate that since extended family relationships include all blood kin and in-laws, analysis of social and political interaction must take this deeper perspective of the family into account.