[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: Gender, Kinship, and Property in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1600)

[ONUR INAL]

Gender, Kinship, and Property in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1600)

Jutta Sperling and Shona K. Wray are inviting contributions to a
volume (likely to come out with Cambridge Scholars' Press) that seeks to
investigate the legacy of Roman law with respect to women's property laws
in different Mediterranean societies of the later Middle Ages and the
Early Modern Period. Individual contributions can focus on one area
and time period or be comparative in nature. We welcome any paper
proposals on Italy, France, and Iberia, but are especially interested
in studies on women's property rights in Islamic law, Jewish communites,
the later Byzantine empire, and island societies.

Among the questions we would like to address are the following:
How did women's property rights, forms of female agency, and
gendered notions of kinship differ across the Mediterranean? What
were the different legal arrangements through which women's property
rights were secured (dowry and testamentary succession in Italy,
equal inheritance and joint ownership in Iberia, divorce suits in
Islamic countries, etc.)? What was the interplay between normative law
and legal practice, and how did women take advantage of incongruencies
between different legal traditions? Did dowry and inheritance
practices differ for women in urban and rural areas and for elite and
non-elite women? How did notions of kinship inflect the rules for
the transmission of property, and vice versa?

Some guiding hypotheses:
As Jo Ann McNamara has recently argued, kinship came to be more
cognatically defined in late antiquity; the property rights of women
improved considerably. Byzantine marriage was more companionate in
nature than its classical precedent, which was governed by the rules of
patrilineage and dowry exchange. In Islamic societies, a similar trend
can be observed. According to David Powers, Mohammed, like Justinianus
a century before him, provided wives in non-dotal marriages with
a percentage of their husbands properties, regulated dowry exchange,
and specified daughters' inheritance rights. After the implosion
of the Roman empire in the West, Germanic successor states formulated
their own law codes, of which the Visigothic law code in Northern Iberia
and the Lombard laws of Central and Northern Italy had the longest lasting
influence. They differed considerably in their regulation of female
ownership: while Visigothic law stressed equal inheritance for daughters
and male dowries, Lombard law did not recognize women's legal personhood,
favored male heirs, but granted widows a third of their deceased husbands'
properties. At the onset of the new millennium, family property law
and kinship structures suffered a renewed patrilineal inflection. In the
economically prosperous and politically vibrant, self-governing cities
of northern and central Italy, feudal Lombard law was abolished; however,
in cities like Florence, the Lombards' insistence on women's need of
a legal guardian or mundualdo was retained. Statutory law reformulated
dowry exchange by abolishing daughters' unconditioned, equal inheritance
rights -- which they had possessed according to Roman Law -- and replaced
it with the right to a "congruous" dowry at the moment of marriage.

As already Diane Owen Hughes has pointed out, Italian medieval dowry law
served to disinherit daughters, but most of all, wives and widows.
Lombard law did conceive of marriage as partially based on co-ownership,
but under statutory law, widows lost all rights to their deceased
husbands' properties. In Iberia, similar forms of disinheritance were
established. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Muslim Spain and
the Maghreb, Maliki family endowments circumvented the Koran's strict
intestate succession rules, making it possible to favor select heirs
in testament-like notarial contracts. Often, although not always,
men were the winners of these private inheritance arrangements. The
Portuguese morgadio, a form of entailment of privileged estates replete
with feudal jurisdiction, followed a similar impulse, namely to exclude
daughters from the well-established practice of equal inheritance.
Following the French model, the Siete Partidas in Spain and the Lei Mental
in Portugal demanded male primogeniture for crown goods in the thirteenth
and fifteenth century, respectively. As a guiding question that might
serve to view the history of Mediterranean women's access to property
and legal services in a more integrated fashion, we ask contributors
to consider whether the trend toward limiting women's property rights
that we can observe for Italy, France, and Iberia, also took place in
the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, and, if so, to what extent?

Shona Kelly Wray (University of Missouri-Kansas City) <WrayS at umkc.edu>
and
Jutta Sperling (Hampshire College) jsperling at hampshire.edu