The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550

by Martha C. Howell

Overview

Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens—wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds.

Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate—and ultimately to redefine—property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the former, a widow typically inherited her husband's property; in the latter, she shared it with or simply held it for his family or offspring. Howell asks why the law changed as it did and assesses the law's effects on both social and gender meanings but she insists that the reform did not originate in general dissatisfaction with custom or a desire to disempower widows. Instead, it was born in a complex economic, social and cultural history during which Douaisiens gradually came to think about both property and gender in new ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226355160
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/22/1998
Series:	Women in Culture and Society
Edition description:	1
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Martha C. Howell is professor of history and director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Note on Money, Dates, and Names
Introduction
Le Libert v. Rohard
Ch. 1: From Custom to Contract
Ch. 2: The Social Context of Custom
Ch. 3: Legal Reform as Social Engineering
Ch. 4: The Social Logic—and Illogic—of Custom
Ch. 5: An Alternative Logic
Ch. 6: Living with the New
Ch. 7: The Weight of Experience
Ch. 8: The Douaisien Reform in Historical Context
Conclusion: Marie, Franchoise, and Their Sisters
App. A: The Evolution of Douai's Douaire Coutumier
App. B: Written Custom and Old Custom in Douai
Glossary of Legal Terminology
Glossary of Measures
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Howell (history, Columbia U.) used the large archive of wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and court records in Douai, Flanders to reveal a centuries-long effort to regulate and redefine property and gender relations. She focuses on the shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract; the economic and social implications of this reform; and its historical and cultural context. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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