Blood & Kinship—Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present

This collection of thirteen essays explores kinship and blood as a substance of relatedness, exploring the merits of kinship as a category for social analysis or whether "relatedness" is more appropriate. The essays focus on historical and existent peoples of Europe from ancient times to the present. They consider the practices that constructed kinship and ideas about blood in ancient Rome, flesh and blood in medieval language about kinship, blood in the Christian idiom, the meaning of blood during the Baroque, class dimensions of blood and race in 18th and 19th-century Brittany, anti-Semitism and the question of "Jewish Blood," biopolitics and taming kinship in the modern state, articulating blood in biomedical contexts between contemporary Britain and Malaysia, and the impact of genetics. The contributors are mostly European professors of history and social science. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Bernhard Jussen has 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 include Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice (2000) and Atlas des Historischen Bildwissens (2009).