Cette thèse a pour objectif de comprendre l’usage de la parenté spirituelle à Lyon aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Deux éléments sont à prendre en compte dans le contexte : la croissance de la population et l’affirmation de la Réforme catholique. L’étude a pour cadre Saint-Nizier, paroisse du centre de la ville avec une forte diversité sociale. Des analyses sociales précises permettent d’examiner la complexité des relations sociales et la souplesse du parrainage, les stratégies et comportements décelables.Les registres paroissiaux constituent la source principale. Cette thèse souhaite également attirer l’attention sur la richesse que l’étude des relations de parenté spirituelle apporte à l’histoire sociale urbaine. Cette source classique nous permet d’aborder l’histoire religieuse d’un point de vue social. / This research aims to understand the use of spiritual kinship in Lyons during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a double context: urban population was in expansion while the Catholic Reformation was pre-eminent. The setting of this study is the parish of Saint-Nizier, which was located right in the town centre and presented real social variety. We want to investigate the complexity of social relationships and the flexibility of godparenthood, the strategies and behaviours which can be detected, thanks to precise social analyses.The main source is the parish registers. This research also aspires to call attention to the richness that spiritual relationships provide in urban social history. This classic source allows us to tackle religious history from a social point of view.

Ideas of kinship play a significant role in structuring everyday life, and yet kinship has been neglected in Christian ethics, as well as moral philosophy and bioethics. Attention has been paid in these disciplines to the ethics of ‘family,’ but little regard has been paid to the fact that kinship is not a given, but is culturally contingent. The thesis seeks to remedy the neglect in recent Christian theological ethics by drawing on resources from the history of Christian thought and practice. It uses social anthropology both to unsettle the accounts of kinship used in Christian ethics, and to expose elements in Christian traditions of thought and practice relating to kinship. Notions of shared bodily substance, the house, gender and personhood recur cross-culturally in giving shape to kinship. By examining these four notions as they inform Christian thought and practice, a theological account is developed. Chapters dedicated to each of these four attempt to provide, in the first instance, a descriptive account of how the notion has structured Christian thought and practice in relation to kinship. Each chapter then turns, in the second instance, to a critical mode, offering a theological treatment of the chapter topic as it bears on kinship. The thesis concludes that kinship in Christ should be considered normatively primary for the Christian, but also that there are ways in which Christians have honoured this kinship in Christ by organising and playing out kinship on a smaller scale. In detailing the distinctively Christian organising principles that structure some practices of kinship ‘in miniature,’ another common practice – the special privileging of the blood tie in structuring kinship – is singled out for critique.