Law, Family and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Thomas Cohen

It often pays to heed the name of a book. While Thomas Kuehn's title, Law, Family and Women, states his subject well, his subtitle, Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy outlines his method, trumpets his ambitions and yet concedes the limits to his achievement. "Toward" is a telling term. We have here a collection of pioneering essays that scout unfamiliar terrain, not by any means a definitive work. "Legal anthropology" is a young science that blends the study of ideas and institutions with that of social praxis. Applied to the past, it recasts old questions in interesting ways. Law loses its autonomy and is wedded to social process.

One term is too ambitious. In fact, Kuehn's subject is not "Renaissance Italy" but that historians' darling, fifteenth-century Florence. That more narrow focus gives the book strength, for the very wealth of fine literature on that city in that century offers Kuehn abundant targets for his trenchant pen. Few famous social historians escape at least an occasional reproach for overlooking or misreading the law, a subject without which, the author argues, we cannot read the habits of the past. To a degree, however, Florence can in fact stand in for "Italy," for its law, like that of other towns, followed the rules of civil and canon law and, also, the traditions deriving from the Lombard codes. Furthermore, the jurists whose consulta (briefs) often figured in decisions were often from other towns. Nevertheless, as Kuehn himself points out in his chapter on a local figure, the mundualdus, a woman's necessary legal agent, Florence, in its statutes, had some rules all its own.

When Kuehn argues that law was central, he does not mean to view it as an independent variable, shaping social custom. Indeed, he probably would recoil at so positivist a term. For his thinking and his rhetoric are much marked by the "post-modernism" that has invaded and transformed cultural anthropology. For Kuehn, therefore, the law neither simply forms nor is simply formed by the politics of family life. Reality, rather, is far more nuanced and subtle. The law offers options, some cheaper, others more burdensome. It contributes to the shaping of strategies. At the same time, in given instances, legal language and legal action bend to accommodate convenience or necessity. What we have here is neither Weber nor Marx but something emphatically in-between, in a zone where thought, language, norm and rule at once lead and follow familial strategies. The author is thus careful to distance himself from those anthropologists who reduce all legal action to the settlement of disputes. This, he argues, is a view that belittles law's semi-autonomy.

What then of "Family" and "Women"? Why not "men" as well? "Women" figure in the title and the essays, among other reasons, because of the famous essays of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, who has argued for the radical subordination of Florentine females, disinherited by their dowries but never detached from the lineage of their birth. As in the work of Klapisch, so here too, the place of women in the passage of property is of central importance. The author does not claim that she is wrong, but again and again argues for nuance. Working again and again by single cases, he explores the strength of female claims to inherit and the liberty of female action in the legal sphere. A problem for his endeavor, which he himself is quick to acknowledge, is the opacity of the legal record. Most of the surviving papers are notarial; thus the historian who can see the steps can only with difficulty impute the motives. Thus, for instance, many a woman who prima facie seems to have acted on her own may have fronted for the interests of the males around her. A cautious reader, Kuehn refuses to pass beyond what he knows the papers show. He eschews microhistorical dramatics.

Thus, Kuehn confirms the general view that legal doctrines, urban statutes, and social custom all conjoined to reinforce the claims of male lineage. Female inheritance was rare and often contested by male agnates, many of them quite remote. The dowry, indeed, was all most women could lay claim to. But, in a chapter on "The Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology," the author points out that, around female claims, there was no unanimity among the doctors and no uniformity in social practice. The configurations of families were so many that no law could cover all the contingencies of inheritance. Not rarely, the women could put in a claim.

Those specialists who appreciate a well-made book and good scholarly apparatus should buy this work. There are more than 100 pages of notes and 25 of bibliography. The analytical index, which is intelligently detailed, is full of references to the contents of the notes. The text seems error-free. Since several evolving fields cross here, the work is at once a valuable instrument and a spirited invitation to continuing discussion.

Thomas Cohen York University