This wide-ranging study of familial, political, and economic change in the West between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries is organized around two themes: the rise and fall of a patriarchalist social order and its replacement by fraternal forms of governance; and the attempts by various reformers to instill self-mastery, originally expected of monks and masters, into subject populations, and the frequently unforeseen effects of this process.

By linking schooling, state-building, and transformations of patriarchal forms of governance, the book also reopens the debate about the social forces that produced state school systems and about the ways schools affected people and institutions. Clear and accessible throughout, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in history, sociology, education, women's and gender studies, and cultural studies.