Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Sandra Cavallo Lyndan Warner

Author:Sandra Cavallo, Lyndan Warner [Sandra Cavallo, Lyndan Warner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781317882770
Google: -MYeBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-30T16:06:29+00:00

The power of fathers

The succession of Florentine wives and mothers who died ab intestato, that is without making a will, was governed by statute.14 A series of laws enacted between 1325 and 1415 set out the following complicated pattern of inheritance and privileges favouring a widow’s most recent husband and her male heirs. If a remarried widow died leaving no surviving children from her new match, then her widowed husband got to keep her dowry and a third of her non-dotal goods, even if she had children from a previous marriage.15 If she did have children from this latest match, they did not have to divide their maternal inheritance with their half brothers and sisters. Finally, daughters could not inherit from their mother if brothers or even nephews were alive. Thus, the Florentine inheritance system contrasted sharply with most of the legislation of Italian communes because, in the first instance, the mother’s inheritance was not divided between all her children but reserved instead for the sons born in her most recent marriage. Secondly, in Florence the blood relatives of a woman who died childless, but who was survived by her husband, lost all their rights of inheritance. Roman law, by contrast, allowed a father to recover the dowry in these circumstances.16

14. Isabelle Chabot, ‘La loi du lignage: notes sur le système successoral florentin (XIVe/XVe-XVIIe siècles)’, Clio: Femmes, Histoire et Sociétés 7 (1998), pp. 51–72. See also Thomas Kuehn, ‘Some ambiguities on female inheritance ideology in the Renaissance’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), pp. 11–36; now available in Kuehn, Law, Family and Women: Towards an Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991), pp. 238–57.

15. Julius Kirshner, ‘Mańtus lucretur dotem uxoris sue premortue in late medieval Florence’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte 77 (1991), pp. 111–55.

16. For a comparative overview of different inheritance systems in late medieval Italy, see F. Niccolai, La Formazione del Diritto Successorio negli Statuti Comunali del Territorio Lombardo-Tosco (Milan, 1940); Isabelle Chabot, ‘Risorse e diritti patrimoniali’, in A. Groppi, ed., Storia delle Donne Italiane, 4 vols (Rome/Bari, 1996), II, Il Lavoro delle Donne. Parte I: LΈtà Medievale, pp. 47–70.

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