Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formativeinfluence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance,especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's useof legal sources along with letters, diaries, andcontemporary accounts allows him to present a compellingimage of the social processes that affected the shape andfunction of the law.The numerous law courts of Italian city-statesconstantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces thepermutations of these laws, then examines their use byFlorentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate socialbehavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage,business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Rangingfrom one man's embittered denunciation of his father toanother's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him asillegitimate, Law, Family, and Women providesfascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life inRenaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions,often articulated in and through the law, affected women. Heexamines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardianfor women—in Florence, the control of fathers over theirmarried daughters, and issues of inheritance by and throughwomen. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda ofRenaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value toboth legal anthropologists and social historians.Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at ClemsonUniversity.