Four generations of the aristocratic Barberini family and its vassals clashed over how the early modern Roman countryside should be governed. Villagers cultivated noble interference, but they frequently resisted it through the strategies of adversarial literacy, and political ways of reading and writing, that challenged the noble hegemony.

The early modern Roman countryside was a site of contestation between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal political regime. Rarely has the role of the inhabitants of this landscape--the villagers--been considered as part of that power struggle.
As Caroline Castiglione shows in this compelling revisionist work, one Roman aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather became increasingly engaged with it during the long eighteenth century. Through their participation in the rural commune, villagers in...

Mothering in the western world has come to be viewed as a highly politicized activity. What mothers do (or fail to do) is publicly debated and considered a measure by which political ideologies are legitimated. While this is often thought to be a product of modernity, its roots and its consequences were already evident in early modern Rome, where an elective monarchy created a politically fluid situation in which aristocratic women played critical roles in advancing their families' interests.

Accounting for Affection analyzes the symbiotic evolution of politics and mothering in...