Over the past few years, the cross-disciplinary field of research devoted to family and kinship history in Europe has seen the emergence of an important stream of studies developing wide-ranging comparative perspectives on great spaces and long periods. Their hypotheses and interpretative models differ somewhat with regard of the factors taken into account, and of the underlying logic identified for these processes. The first part of this volume presents a broad discussion of these recent developments. The chapters in the second part have an alpine focus and are dealing more or less directly with the theoretical framework proposed by Dionigi Alberäs book, Au fil des generations. The contributions to the third part of the book are further opening up the field. They leave the alpine terrain and are dedicated to some European contexts, with approaches that are generally influenced by the experience of Alberäs analysis of Alpine Europe.

Dionigi Albera is Director of Research in the Centre national de recherches scientifique CNRS. He directs also the Institut d¿Ethnologie Méditerranéenne, Européenne et Comparative IDEMEC at the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l¿homme MMSH (Université Aix-Marseille).
Luigi Lorenzetti is Professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana where he is also coordinator of the Laboratorio di Storia delle Alpi, Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio.
Jon Mathieu is Professor of History at the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, of the University of Lucerne.

Dionigi Albera/Luigi Lorenzetti/Jon Mathieu: Introduction - Part 1: Alpine Europe? Reconsidering Recent Research - Jon Mathieu: Transitions in the Domestic Organisation of the Alpine Area, from the Late Middle Ages to Modernity - Simon Teuscher: Problems of Scale and Mediation in Studies of Kinship in the Past - Dionigi Albera: From the Alps to Europe: Combining Long-Term Approaches to Family and Kinship History - Part 2: From the Alps - Luigi Lorenzetti: Regional Spaces and Domestic Organisation. Homogeneity, Transversality and Trans-Cultural Diffusion in the Agnatic Alpine World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries) - Margareth Lanzinger: Patterns of Domestic Organisation: The Transfer of Goods and of Relatives - Sandro Guzzi-Heeb: The Uses of Kin. Kinship, Social Networks and Identities in the Swiss Alps (Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries) - Part 3: Towards Europe - Elie Haddad: Times and Spaces of Noble Kinship (France, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) - Fabrice Boudjaaba: Changes in the Norman Inheritance System: a Legal Revolution or an Anthropological Evolution of Kinship in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries? - Jerome Luther Viret: Children leaving Home in Europe in the Modern Age: Towards a Typology taking into account Western European Forms of Authority - Michael Gasperoni: Reconsidering Matrimonial Practices and Endogamy in the Early Modern Period. The Case of Central Italy (San Marino, Romagna and Marche) - Vincent Gourdon: Godparenthood in Western Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Plurality of Models and Dynamics of Convergence.