Dissolving Kinship in the Early Middle Ages, ca. AD 400–1000, University of York, June 1–2, 2023

Kinship is often treated as a social phenomenon that binds people together permanently through the creation of mutual ties, obligations, and emotions between individuals. Over the last decades, work on family and kinship in the early Middle Ages has addressed the basis of this claim through considering two key issues: i) how new types of kinship ties emerged in the early Middle Ages; ii) how far early-medieval kinship was derived from spiritual or blood ties.  

However, kinship can also be used to separate as much as bring together, and kinship ties were not always as permanent as might be inferred. The moments where kinship ties were considered to cease offer us the opportunity to investigate how these conceptual differences might shape or be expressed in social behaviour. By considering the extent to which moments of imposed (or initiated) separation can be considered dissolvement of kinship ties, our workshop addresses two related issues.

First, our workshop seeks to investigate how such separations occurred, and by whom they were acknowledged. Second, it seeks to establish comparable factors that can be extended to kinship ties in early-medieval European and Mediterranean societies that did not necessarily share the same ideological underpinning of family, systems of enforcement, or agreement on which ties were intra- or extra-familial.

Throughout the event and during a final roundtable discussion, we hope to interrogate the extent to which revealing the processes through which kinship may have been dissolved can improve our understanding of how kinship ties were created and sustained in the first place.

Proposals for 30-minute papers are invited from late-stage postgraduates and ECRs. We suggest a few suggested moments to stimulate but not limit the scope of enquiry:

• The status of hostages and their familial dependents; their status and reception on return
• The treatment of absent or missing relatives and their partners and dependents 
• The negotiation of familial ties between relatives of differing free/unfree statuses
• The treatment of imprisoned, convicted or executed relatives and their dependents
• Remarriage, adoption, and other methods to restore familial relationships
• Adultery, assault and other (non-legal) modes of instigating separation
• Concubinage, fosterage and other modes of quasi-familial status
• Familial ties across ethnic, racial or religious divisions
• (In)consistent alienation of specific familial rights or duties within separations