Christopher H. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of History at Wayne State University. A National Book Award nominee and Guggenheim Fellow, his publications include The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920: The Politics of De-Industrialization (1995).

Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Illustrations and Tables

Introduction
David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher

Chapter 1. Agnatio, Cognatio, Consanguinitas: Kinship and Blood in Ancient Rome
Ann-Cathrin Harders

Chapter 2. The Bilineal Transmission of Blood in Ancient Rome
Philippe Moreau

Chapter 3. Flesh and Blood in Medieval Language about Kinship
Anita Guerreau-Jalabert

Chapter 4. Flesh and Blood in the Treatises on the Arbor Consanguinitatis (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
Simon Teuscher

Chapter 5. Discourses of Blood and Kinship in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile
Teofilo F. Ruiz

Chapter 6. The Shed Blood of Christ. From Blood as Metaphor to Blood as Bearer of Identity
Gérard Delille

Chapter 7. Descent and Alliance: Cultural Meanings of Blood in the Baroque
David Warren Sabean

Chapter 8. Kinship, Blood, and the Emergence of the Racial Nation in the French Atlantic World, 1600-1789
Guillaume Aubert

Chapter 9. Class Dimensions of Blood, Kinship, and Race in Brittany, 1780-1880
Christopher H. Johnson

Chapter 10. Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Question of "Jewish Blood"
Cornelia Essner

Chapter 11. Biosecuritization: The Quest for Synthetic Blood and the Taming of Kinship
Kath Weston

Chapter 12. Articulating Blood and Kinship in Biomedical Contexts in Contemporary Britain and Malaysia
Janet Carsten

Chapter 13. From Blood to Genes? Rethinking Consanguinity in the Context of Geneticization
Sarah Franklin

Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index

The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.