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Law, Death, and Heirs in the Renaissance: Repudiation of Inheritance in Florence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Thomas Kuehn
Thomas Kuehn*
Affiliation:
Clemson University
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Extract

In traditional Europe, social reproduction rested in good part on inheritance. Property and status passed from generation to generation according to varying schemes of transmission tied to notions of blood descent, filiation, lineage, and affinity. Tracing changes in these schemes has been one of the central concerns of social history. Much of Renaissance social history has also gravitated around inheritance. By establishing magistracies like the Ufficiali dei Pupilli to oversee legal guardianship of minors and providing a public fund for dowries, the Monte delle doti, such cities as Florence indicated how important familial continuity was. Thanks to the work done by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, William Kent, and others for Florence; of Stanley Chojnacki and others for Venice; and of yet other scholars for other cities, we are in a much better position to understand how important and complex inheritance was, how generally successful it was in preserving property in the hands of a narrow elite, to what degree marital and other practices were geared to inheritance strategies, and how difficult those strategies could be to carry out in the face of demographic and economic realities.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Fall 1992 , pp. 484 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1992

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