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OverviewOur ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard.In Sex in an Old Regime City, Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide. This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Julie Hardwick (John E. Green Professor of History, John E. Green Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin)Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Dimensions: Width: 15.50cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 23.90cm Weight: 0.544kg ISBN: 9780190945183ISBN 10: 0190945184 Pages: 294 Publication Date: 06 October 2020 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Manufactured on demand  We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier. Table of Contents"Acknowledgments Introduction A Foundling's Garter and the World of Young People's Intimacy Ch.. 1. Sourcing Intimate Histories: The Social World of Young Workers Ch. 2. Peril Stories: Licit Intimacy, Space, and Community Safeguarding Ch. 3. Holding Men Responsible: Fertility, Community, and Court Ch. 4. ""Remedies"" and Remedies: Managing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy Ch. 5. Intimate Labor: Paid Work and an Intimate Economy of Reproduction Ch. 6. Foundlings and Makeshift Coffins: Community Complicity and Dead Babies Conclusion: The End of the Old Regime? Notes Bibliography Index"ReviewsHistoriography has come a long way since Foucault and first-wave feminism. In Julie Hardwick's compelling study of youthful intimacy in early modern Lyon, the word 'patriarchy' never even appears. This is not because the city was a sexual utopia...but because our understandings of the early modern state, law and gender have changed. A royal edict of 1556 against clandestine pregnancy which supported much of the disciplining narrative turned out to be misunderstood by historians and mostly ignored at the time....Her close reading of hundreds of cases reveals not a parade of sexual transgressions in need of discipline but commonly accepted courtship practices that went wrong.... Far from disciplining young women, then, the Lyon court disciplined men for failing to keep their promises. In so doing they restored women's honour. -- Jan Machielsen, Times Literary Supplement Through an examination of young workers' intimacy, Hardwick...upends the commonly accepted idea that disciplining women's sexuality was a major goal of the early modern state and shows how communities pragmatically accepted and managed consequences of physical intimacy, including out-of-wedlock pregnancy....She finds that communities accepted young people's intimacy and pragmatically worked with couples to manage the consequences....The community support systems that developed, encompassing clerics, lawyers, wet nurses, midwives, and landladies, were part of the larger old regime economy and sought to minimize the disruptions of pregnancy to women's roles in the labor force and their chances of marriage later on. -- CHOICE An eye-opener and a veritable tour-de-force, Hardwick's book offers a fascinating window into sexual standards in ancien regime France and reveals a stunning and complex system of communal complicity. Her careful exploration of Lyon's archival records sheds new light on the lives and intimate stories of ordinary working-class young adults pre-1789 and offers a new historiography of sex at the time. -- Evelyne M. Bornier, Seventeenth-Century News A superb reconstruction of a lost world of intimacy and power. Julie Hardwick's absorbing, enriching work reveals the common language of love; the balance of force and caresses in courtship; the pragmatic concerns of marriage; and the solutions to unplanned pregnancies, showing the capacity of young women and men to shape their own circumstances and tell their stories. -- Laura Gowing, King's College London Sex in an Old Regime City explores a topic that seems well beyond the reach of historians: sexual intimacy between urban adolescents at a quarter of a millennium remove. Julie Hardwick's remarkable study is based on the 'archive of reproduction' accumulated around the biological and emotional consequences of that intimacy DL ranging from pregnancy declarations, paternity suits, notarial documents, doctors' prescriptions, religious injunctions, infant autopsies and hospital archives through to billet-doux and foundlings' tokens. Hardwick's humane and sympathetic eye reveals a richly delineated world that has poignant continuities as well as contrasts with our own. -- Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London A boldly written and brilliantly researched tour-de-force. Drawing upon meticulous archival work, Julie Hardwick explodes our understanding of what we thought we knew about pregnancy declarations, licit intimacy, and patriarchal discipline and reveals a far more complex system of communal complicity. Sex in an Old Regime City is a must-read for all scholars of the early modern world, especially those interested in legal, social, and gender history. -- Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College This well-written and impressively researched book sheds important new light on sexual intimacy, reproduction, and marriage among young adults in eighteenth-century France. Stories of the lives and loves of ordinary working people bring their previously inaccessible intimate world to life. -- Clare Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This well-written and impressively researched book sheds important new light on sexual intimacy, reproduction, and marriage among young adults in eighteenth-century France. Stories of the lives and loves of ordinary working people bring their previously inaccessible intimate world to life. * Clare Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign * A boldly written and brilliantly researched tour-de-force. Drawing upon meticulous archival work, Julie Hardwick explodes our understanding of what we thought we knew about pregnancy declarations, licit intimacy, and patriarchal discipline and reveals a far more complex system of communal complicity. Sex in an Old Regime City is a must-read for all scholars of the early modern world, especially those interested in legal, social, and gender history. * Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College * Sex in an Old Regime City explores a topic that seems well beyond the reach of historians: sexual intimacy between urban adolescents at a quarter of a millennium remove. Julie Hardwick's remarkable study is based on the 'archive of reproduction' accumulated around the biological and emotional consequences of that intimacy - ranging from pregnancy declarations, paternity suits, notarial documents, doctors' prescriptions, religious injunctions, infant autopsies and hospital archives through to billet-doux and foundlings' tokens. Hardwick's humane and sympathetic eye reveals a richly delineated world that has poignant continuities as well as contrasts with our own. * Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London * A superb reconstruction of a lost world of intimacy and power. Julie Hardwick's absorbing, enriching work reveals the common language of love; the balance of force and caresses in courtship; the pragmatic concerns of marriage; and the solutions to unplanned pregnancies, showing the capacity of young women and men to shape their own circumstances and tell their stories. * Laura Gowing, King's College London * Author InformationJulie Hardwick is the John E. Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Seventeenth-Century France (OUP, 2009) and The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France. 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