International Congress FAMILIES AND HISTORICAL CHANGE. Relational Dynamics and Social Transformations. A global perspective, 13th-20th centuries

On 7, 8 and 9 May 2025 a major family history conference will be held in Albacete (Spain). A session in Axis 1 of the conference ("Sources, methods and proposals for methodological renewal. Between interdisciplinarity and artificial intelligence") will be devoted to personal writings. The call for proposals can be found below. The session is open and all proposals are welcome on all types of personal writings from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. The languages of the conference and the session are English, French, Castilian, Portuguese, and Italian, allowing for a wide exchange of ideas. The conference website and all the necessary information are at the following address: https://eventos.uclm.es/118494/detail/congreso-internacional-familias-y-cambio-historico-dinamicas-relacionales-y-transformaciones-social.html. You also may write directly to francois-joseph.ruggiu@sorbonne-universite.fr.

A major source in the history of the family: personal writings from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Personal writings (egodocuments, Selbstzeugnisse, écrits du for privé…) form a group of historical documents (including diaries, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, correspondence, etc.) whose number has grown steadily during the early modern and modern periods. Whether they are written immediately or retrospectively, they reveal the social world in which evolved the people who wrote them. They bear witness to conceptions of the family, family structures and networks, demographic behaviours, modes of family relationships, types of inheritances immaterial transmission, ordinary family practices, whether based on solidarity or conflicts, or a complex set of feelings, emotions and affects. Despite a number of pioneering studies, personal writings still under-used as a way of studying the family. The aim of this session is therefore to encourage people to read of these texts from the point of view of the history of the family, or families, or individuals within family or kinship. The session is open to all themes and methodological approaches without restriction of period or place. Studies of a single text will be accepted as well as studies based on a series of several texts. Contributions on colonial spaces and non-European personal writings will be particularly welcome.