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

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