Law, Family, and Women

by Thomas Kuehn

• ISBN13: 9780226457628
• ISBN10: 0226457621
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2015-08-07
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Summary

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formative influence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance, especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's use of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling image of the social processes that affected the shape and function of the law. The numerous law courts of Italian city-states constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the permutations of these laws, then examines their use by Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage, business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as illegitimate,Law, Family, and Womenprovides fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions, often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He examines the role of the mundualdus--a male legal guardian for women--in Florence, the control of fathers over their married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to both legal anthropologists and social historians. Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson University.

Table of Contents

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Law

Law and Arbitration in Renaissance Florence

Dispute Processing in the Renaissance: Some Florentine Examples

Conflicting Conceptions of Property in Quattrocento Florence: A Dispute over Ownership in 1425-26

Family

Honor and Conflict in a Fifteenth-Century Florentine Family

A Reconsideration of Self-Disciplining Pacts among the Peruzzi of Florence

Reading between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti'sDella Famigliain Light of His Illegitimacy

"As If Conceived within a Legitimate Marriage": A Dispute Concerning Legitimation in Quattrocento Florence

Women

Women, Marriage, and Patria Potestas in Late Medieval Florence

"Cum Consensu Mundualdi": Legal Guardianship of Women in Quattrocento Florence

Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance

Appendix: Examples of Arbitration

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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