Illegitimacy, Family, and Stigma is the first full-length exploration of what it was like to be illegitimate in eighteenth-century England, telling stories of individuals across the socio-economic scale. This vivid investigation of the meaning of illegitimacy gets to the heart of powerful inequalities in families, communities, and the state. Approaches the subject in entirely new ways... a sophisticated and meticulous analysis of what it meant to be illegitimate in late Stuart and Georgian England, which will undoubtedly become a core text in the field.