BiblioVault - Books about Paternity

Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior
Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson
Harvard University Press, 2010
Library of Congress GN281.G7 2010 | Dewey Decimal 306.8742

We've all heard that a father's involvement enriches the lives of children. But how much have we heard about how having a child affects a father's life? As Peter Gray and Kermyt Anderson reveal, fatherhood actually alters a man's sexuality, rewires his brain, and changes his hormonal profile. His very health may suffer—in the short run—and improve in the long. These are just a few aspects of the scientific side of fatherhood explored in this book, which deciphers the findings of myriad studies and makes them accessible to the interested general reader.

Since the mid-1990s Anderson and Gray, themselves fathers of young children, have been studying paternal behavior in places as diverse as Boston, Albuquerque, Cape Town, Kenya, and Jamaica. Their work combines the insights of evolutionary and comparative biology, cross-cultural analysis, and neural physiology to deepen and expand our understanding of fatherhood—from the intense involvement in childcare seen in male hunter-gatherers, to the prodigality of a Genghis Khan leaving millions of descendants, to the anonymous sperm donor in a fertility clinic.

Looking at every kind of fatherhood—being a father in and out of marriage, fathering from a distance, stepfathering, and parenting by gay males—this book presents a uniquely detailed picture of how being a parent fits with men's broader social and work lives, how fatherhood evolved, and how it differs across cultures and through time.

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Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence
Thomas Kuehn
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Library of Congress KKH9851.13.K84 2001 | Dewey Decimal 346.4551017

As far back as Jacob Burckhardt, illegitimate children have been considered advantaged, insofar as they lacked family obligations. Celebrated Renaissance figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, and da Vinci were born illegitimately. Of course, their status put these children at a legal and a social disadvantage that was nearly impossible to overcome in usual circumstances. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence is the first systematic study of a population of illegitimate children--in this case in the city often seen at the heart of Renaissance politics and culture, Florence.
The Florentine catasto, a fiscal survey of households taken at several points in the fifteenth century, locates hundreds of illegitimate children and reveals a great deal about their household circumstances and parentage. Supplementing this information are notarial documents and family account books. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence places Florentine illegitimate children in a complete legal context, culminating in examination of several Florentine legal cases. Thomas Kuehn shows how lawyers were called on to cope with and make legal sense of the actions and prejudices of Florentines toward their illegitimate kin.
It is clear, in its simplest terms, that illegitimacy in Florence was a permanent, if not fixed, status. Most illegitimate children, especially girls, were abandoned; infanticide was undoubtedly practiced. But even those children raised by benevolent fathers and granted legitimation always remained "legitimatus" and not "legitimus." Florentines whose illegitimate paternity was admitted were overwhelmingly born of elite fathers but poor or servile mothers. In neither social nor legal terms did the illegitimate share fully in the personhood of the legitimate adult male Florentine citizen. Still, ambiguities of status could be useful for those with sufficient wealth and social standing to exploit their potential.
Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence will appeal to social historians of Europe, medieval and early modern, especially those concerned with family life, women, and children, as well as all those interested in Florentine history. Legal historians will find it useful as well.
Thomas Kuehn is Professor of History, Clemson University.

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The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance
Valeria Finucci
Duke University Press, 2003
Library of Congress HQ1090.7.I8F56 2003 | Dewey Decimal 305.310945

The Manly Masquerade unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence: medical and travel literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and plays, chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli, Tasso, and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by highlighting the beliefs—widely held at the time—that conception could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman’s encounter with an animal, or even that a pregnant woman’s imagination could erase the father’s "signature" from the fetus. Against these visions of reproduction gone awry, Finucci looks at how concepts of masculinity were tied to issues of paternity through social standing, legal matters, and inheritance practices.

Highlighting the fissures running through Italian Renaissance ideas of manliness, Finucci describes how, alongside pervasive images of the virile, sexually active man, early modern Italian culture recognized the existence of hermaphrodites and started to experiment with a new kind of sexuality by manufacturing a non-man: the castrato. Following the creation of castrati, the Church forbade the marriage of all non-procreative men, and, in this move, Finucci identifies a powerful legitimation of the view that what makes men is not the possession of male organs or the ability to have sex, but the capability to father. Through analysis, anecdote, and rich cultural description, The Manly Masquerade exposes the "real" early modern man: the paterfamilias.

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Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father
Nara B. Milanich
Harvard University Press, 2019
Library of Congress RA1138.M55 2019 | Dewey Decimal 362.82

“In this rigorous and beautifully researched volume, Milanich considers the tension between social and biological definitions of fatherhood, and shows how much we still have to learn about what constitutes a father.”
—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

For most of human history, the notion that paternity was uncertain appeared to be an immutable law of nature. The unknown father provided entertaining plotlines from Shakespeare to the Victorian novelists and lay at the heart of inheritance and child support disputes. But in the 1920s new scientific advances promised to solve the mystery of paternity once and for all. The stakes were high: fatherhood has always been a public relationship as well as a private one. It confers not only patrimony and legitimacy but also a name, nationality, and identity.

The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing the scientific quest for the father up to the present, with the advent of seemingly foolproof DNA analysis, Nara Milanich shows that the effort to establish biological truth has not ended the quest for the father. Rather, scientific certainty has revealed the fundamentally social, cultural, and political nature of paternity. As Paternity shows, in the age of modern genetics the answer to the question “Who’s your father?” remains as complicated as ever.

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Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity
Nancy Jay
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Library of Congress GN473.5.J38 1992 | Dewey Decimal 306.69134

Why does sacrifice, more than any other major religious institution, depend on gender dichotomy? Why do so many societies oppose sacrifice to childbirth, and why are childbearing women so commonly excluded from sacrificial practices? In this feminist study of relations between sacrifice, gender, and social organization, Nancy Jay reveals sacrifice as a remedy for having been born of woman, and hence uniquely suited to establishing certain and enduring paternity. Drawing on examples of ancient and modern societies, Jay synthesizes sociology of religion, ethnography, biblical scholarship, church history, and classics to argue that sacrifice legitimates and maintains patriarchal structures that transcend men's dependence on women's reproductive powers.

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