Immigrants and formalisation of social ties in Early Modern Italy: Ivrea in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Over the last few years, there has been a steady increase in interest in once neglected social ties, especially godparenthood¹ and, to a much lesser degree, marriage witnessing.² Stimulated by new empirical studies that provided data of a kind unavailable in the past,³ international researchers began to realise that information about these ties, when collected systematically from the parish registers of baptisms and marriages, allows analysis of the inner — and most obscure — workings of past societies. Even more recently, the techniques of network analysis have been applied to data about godpar-enthood, bringing these studies yet closer to the core of current research in the social sciences.⁴