Caroline Castiglione is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and History at Brown University, USA. She is the author of Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (2005), winner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2006.

"This book traces the triumph of motherly love among the highest elites of seventeenth-century Rome. ... Accounting for Affection will be required reading for historians of the family, the early modern state, and the role of emotions in history. Castiglione has done the field a service, and successfully placed motherhood, and mothers, at the heart of the early modern political imaginary." (P. Renee Baernstein, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 89 (1), March, 2017) "Castiglione is to be commended for her own resourcefulness in assembling a large quantity of first-person accounts of the women's range of interests and enterprises. ... her book is a valuable account of the importance of women in the family dynamics and family politics of the early modern Roman aristocracy." (Stanley Chojnacki, American Historical Review, Vol. 121 (4), October, 2016)

• Introduction1. Practicing Motherhood When the Definition of 'Family' is Ambiguous: Anna Colonna and the Barberini Dynasty, 1627-1647 2. The Interests Common to Us All: Olimpia Giustiniani on the Governing of the Roman Aristocratic Family 3. At the Nexus of Impossibility: The Medical and the Maternal in Seventeenth-Century Rome 4. Ippolita's Wager: Letting Daughters Decide in the Early Eighteenth Century 5. Extravagant Pretensions: The Triumph of Maternal Love in the World of Rome Conclusion Appendices Bibliography