Imagining and organising kinship : The entailment system (14th-17th centuries)

Abstract

This book deals with kinship as an intrinsic element of the social agency of entails. In a broad chronological scope, from the first manifestations of entailment in the 14th century to 1700, it explains how entail founders sought to imagine and organise kinship groups and relationships, shaping structures, imposing hierarchies and behaviours on their relatives and descendants within a horizon of perpetuity, and ultimately producing a lasting influence on kinship, a fundamental structure in the medieval and early modern Portuguese social fabric.