The Power of Emotions: Negotiating Mother–Daughter Relationships in Seventeenth-century Hungary

Abstract

This case study explores the epistolary strategies of negotiating the mother-daughter relationship through a reading of the correspondence between a widowed mother and her two married, half-sister daughters. Drawing on recent scholarship which investigates how emotional practices shaped relations of power, this study seeks to highlight how differences in age, social rank, and position in the family hierarchy between the half-sisters provoked distinctive strategies of bargaining their bonds to their mother. Furthermore, it contrasts rhetorical tactics adopted in everyday communication and in moments of crisis and interprets such epistolary strategies in the context of performing filial/maternal identities and doing authority.