Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy

Explores how family property was inherited, managed and shared legally and its central role in Renaissance Italy.

Thomas Kuehn (Author)

9781316513538, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 March 2022

320 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'Was familia the fixed point of reference for Renaissance Italy's patriarchal social order? Kuehn complicates and illuminates our understanding of it. The obsession with assembling and transferring property over generations came relatively late, with legal forms evolving to make patrimony, memory, and dignitas the very substance of family identity over time. Complex, fascinating, and necessary reading.' Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. In the Renaissance, jurists, humanists, and moralists began to theorize on the relations between people and property that formed the 'substance' of the family and what held it together over the years. Family property was a bundle of shared rights. This was most evident when brothers shared a household and enterprise, but it also faced overlapping claims from children and wives which the paterfamilias had to recognize. Thomas Kuehn explores patrimony in legal thought, and how property was inherited, managed and shared in Renaissance Italy. Managing a patrimony was not a simple task. This led to a complex and active conceptualization of shared rights, and a conscious application of devices in the law that could override liabilities and preserve the group, or carve out distinct shares for each member. This wide-ranging volume charts the ever-present conflicts that arose and were a constant feature of family life.

1. Introduction
2. Bartolus and Family in Law
3. The Divisible Patrimony: Legal Property Relations
of Fathers and Sons in Renaissance Florence
4. Property of Spouses in Law in Renaissance Florence
5. Societas and Fraterna of Brothers
6. Fideicommissum and Law: Consilia of Bartolomeo Sozzini and Filippo Decio
7. Estate Inventories as Legal Instruments in Renaissance Italy
8. Prudence, Personhood, and Law in Renaissance Italy
9. Addendum: A Final Case
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], European history [HBJD], History [HB]