adoption over the ages

[marycatelli]

Exactly how counterpart do you want your cultures to be?  It can have interesting ramifications, with laws and things, in the oddest corners.

Adoption was not in common law until quite recently.  Some adopted it sooner than others, but the common practice was to have informal adoptions, even with name changes.  (Which had no legal standing.  The blood parent could lay claim to the child at any time, and no doubt there are a lot of plots in there.)

Civil law had it, from ancient times, but the practice there was chiefly of adopting adult men to continue the family line.  (After the same manner as the Japanese, often enough, with any handy daughter marrying the adopted man.)  Even if someone took up a foundling to be raised as a child, not a slave, the child remained the offspring of the abandoning parents.  (A fact wide exploited to resolve New Comedy plots by revealing the heroine's respectable parentage and so eligibility to marry the hero.)  But the legalities were there.  A later culture might exploit them.

I decided to have one civil law and one common law country next to the other.  Since the heroine fled from the common law to the civil law one, I can finagle her arranging an adoption for the orphan girl.  Especially since it's merely a civil law country, not ancient Rome.

Comments

[superversive.livejournal.com]

I think there’s an interesting question in here, but I am still dead stymied by your opening:

Exactly how counterpart do you want your cultures to be?

I must say, I don’t want my cultures to be counterpart, or usufruct, or defalcation, or parallelism. I would rather they were something a bit more adjectival, and something that doesn’t require an unstated other subject for the predicate to convey a meaning.

*stumped*

[marycatelli]

Ah. I have read in places where "fantasy counterpart culture" is a pseudo- Wales, or Europe, or France, or what have you.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I’ve missed those places, and upon reflection, I am not terribly sorry to have missed them.

The explanation helps. All tickety-boo now.

*beatific smile which fools no one*

[marycatelli]

Well, sometimes it helps to have a term to describe a world with this island Albion, and across this narrow band of water, a country called Gaule, with which Albion once went to war for a hundred years, and the king of Albion still claims to be the rightful king of Gaule. . . they are counterparts because in geography and history of that world, they are the thinly veiled equivalents of real world countries -- or thickly veiled, if you choose that instead.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Right. In other words, that strain of worldbuilding that runs from Guy Gavriel Kay (at the high end) to the upside-down map of Europe in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (as a parody of the low end).

I agree that it’s good to have a term for that; it just probably isn’t a great idea to assume up front that everybody already knows the term. I didn’t, and my brain got quite a lot of chewing exercise before you helpfully stepped in and defined it for me.

(Apropos of nothing, one day I want to make a billion dollars in the intercontinental freight business. Then I can go to cons, tell people I’m in the shipping business, and laugh at all the fanfic writers who think I therefore actually care who Hermione should have ended up with.)

[marycatelli]

The gentle art of figuring out which terms are general knowledge and which esoteric can be quite a trick.

[benbenberi.livejournal.com]

Adoption is an interesting area because it exposes assumptions about identity & relationships, & the intersection of social & property hierarchies, even more than marriage does. Frex, as you mention, English common law did not recognize adoption till 1926 -- until then, an adopted child had no rights to inherit property, which could only pass along the (presumptive) biological bloodline. (Adoptees of course could receive non-real estate bequests via a will, or gifts during the donor's lifetime of whatever the donor had the power to give.)

Civil law next to common law - like Scotland & England? Southern France & Northern France? Many possibilities for complication...!

[marycatelli]

This is a steampunk setting, so a touch of Scotland & England effect, except that they aren't unified, and are powerful enough countries to keep it that way.

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember one of the shades of meaning that modern ears tend to miss in the New Testament's talk of adopting someone is that adopted kids can't be disowned. It was a really really big deal that I still don't quite understand the shades of meaning of, since I don't understand the level of commitment that disowning would take....

[marycatelli]

It depends on the legal system involved. Some adoptions can be disrupted.

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

I guess I wasn't clear-- in Jesus' context. Becoming an "adopted son of God" is a RBD.

[marycatelli]

Ah.