This publication highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, it examines how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, it deals with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth is analysed how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country's borders.
This book focuses on how dramatic changes in living conditions affected key parts of the life course of ordinary citizens: marriage and divorce. This comparative volume draw on newly available micro-level data, as well as qualitative sources such as war diaries.