This book studies family life and gender broadly within Italy, not just one region or city, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Paternal control of the household was paramount in Italian life at this time, with control of property and even marital choices and career paths laid out for children and carried out from beyond the grave by means of written testaments. However, the reality was always more complex than a simple reading of local laws and legal doctrines would seem to permit, especially when there were no sons to step forward as heirs. Family disputes provided an opening for legal ambiguities to redirect property and endow women with property and means of control. This book uses the decisions of lawyers and judges to examine family dynamics through the lens of law and legal disputes.

This book studies family life and gender within Italy through the lens of law and legal disputes.

This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions.Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.

English translations of the author's most important articles.

Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules.

These essays on the problems and functions of biography - particularly those of writers, thinkers and artists - investigate a subject of enduring importance for those interested in culture.

Andrew Riggsby provides a survey of the main areas of Roman law, and their place in Roman life.