This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This book combines the interdisciplinary insights of history, anthropology, and computing to examine the interrelationships between politics, kinship, and marriage in a late-medieval city-state. At the heart of the study is a reconsideration of `office' and the ways in which ties of kinshipand marriage were mobilized to build electoral success. In fifteenth-century Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik) membership of the Great Council, which nominated and elected office-holders, was restricted to the legitimate male offspring of patrician brides and grooms. The patrician class was highlyendogamous, and the relationship between endogamy and electoral support is an important theme running through this book. A related theme concerns the age differences between spouses, which are shown to have important structural implications for the organization of the casata, kinship relations, andmarriage ties. These implications are investigated using a variety of innovative methods, including cohort analysis and computer simulation.