As we turn from institutions to families, a different social history of early modern academic knowledge emerges. Celibacy was the norm in northern European universities until the late fifteenth century, when it began to erode. As new types of family households emerged, domestic arrangements had to be renegotiated, but what appears to be a sharp break between scholarly celibacy and marriage takes on a different shape when we consider kinship practices. It turns out to be one aspect of a much broader process of transformation that involved both the relationships between multiple households and their internal organization.

Speaker

Gadi Algazi is Professor of History at the Department of History at Tel Aviv University and currently director of the Minerva Center for German History there. His main fields of interest are the social and cultural history of Western Europe between 1350 and 1600, historical anthropology (especially the history of family, kinship, and gender), the social history of colonialism in Israel/Palestine, particularly after 1948, and the social history of science. Algazi is a member of the editorial board of the journal Past and Present, co-editor of the Hebrew historical quarterly Zmanim, and served as senior editor of the journal History & Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past.