Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her teaching and research interests are Family History, Women’s and Gender History, European History, Middle Ages-present with an emphasis on social and cultural history. She has written two books, Poverty, Charity and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State Press, 2000).