Volume 2, No. 5 (May, 1992) pp.75-77
LAW, FAMILY, AND WOMEN: TOWARD A LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF
RENAISSANCE ITALY by Thomas Kuehn. Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991. 415 pp. Cloth $ 29.00
Reviewed by George Dameron, Department of History, St. Michael's
College (Colchester, Vermont).
A former domestic policy advisor during the Carter administration
observed during a recent interview on the PBS program
"Frontline" that corporations fear the enforcement of
federal statutes more than they do the statutes themselves.
Therefore, to protect their clients, corporate law firms tend to
focus their energies on the regulatory phase of the statutes
rather than on the period during the passage of the legislation
through Congress. We learn in Thomas Kuehn's superb collection of
ten magisterial essays on law and society in fourteenth and
fifteenth century Florence that the dissonance between the theory
and the actual practice of the law was just as great in Florence
five centuries ago as it can be currently in the United States.
In Kuehn's distinctive vision of Florentine society, the law was
ambiguous and often incoherent. Disagreeing with legal historians
who posit little jurisprudential creativity after the fourteenth
century, Kuehn claims that the fifteenth century was also
decisively important. Kuehn proposes that kinship was primarily a
"cultural construct" (155) and an ideology by which
individuals and kinsmen pursued family strategies. The promotion
and protection of family honor appears as one of the chief
leitmotifs of the essays. Although he acknowledges that women
lived within a patriarchal order, the author attempts to offer a
more "nuanced sense of the historical understanding of
gender" (13) in which the status of women was not as
oppressive and one- dimensional as other historians have argued.
Known for his earlier work on legal emancipation, Kuehn continues
to explore in many of these essays the ambiguous notion of
"personhood" (13).
The ten studies and the superb introductory essay that the author
has gathered together in this volume are some of the finest
articles in the field of late medieval and early modern Italian
history that have appeared in recent years. Seven chapters and
portions of another have previously appeared in different
publications over the past decade. Social historians with little
or no training in legal history will want to study these essays
for their methodological sophistication and insights about how to
use legal texts for social history. Legal scholars will be
interested to study how Kuehn uses extra-legal sources to
illuminate an understanding of the law. Relying primarily on both
published and unpublished notarial records from the Florentine
archives, the author examines the theory and the practice of the
law to "delineate problems about Renaissance history,
especially social history" (1). Kuehn's extensive knowledge
of the primary and secondary sources is formidable. These essays
collectively attempt to offer a "legal anthropology" of
Florentine society that will reveal how the law actually served
the interests of litigants within a social context in which
disputants could also draw on other methods of dispute settlement
(like peace pacts or violence) (11).
Dividing the essays into three parts ("Law,"
"Family," and "Women"), Kuehn uses case
studies of legal disputes to comment on the crucial
historiographical and anthropological debates regarding those
three issues.
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Each study basically follows the same methodological structure: a
description of the problem (arbitration or legitimization, for
example), an overview of the historiographical tradition, an
outline of the legal tradition in question, a thorough analysis
of actual case studies, and a conclusion that proposes a novel
reading of the issue. In each of the essays Kuehn's approach is
interdisciplinary.
In the first set of three essays on "Law," the author
argues that the law was inherently ambiguous, creating broad
frameworks by which individuals and kinsmen could pursue their
goals and interests in competition and conflict with others. In
"Dispute Processing in the Renaissance: Some Florentine
Examples," Kuehn is critical of "rules-oriented"
legal historians who tend to ignore the application of law in
actual cases. He also chastises legal anthropologists who
overemphasize the importance of politics, downplay the role of
legal norms (76-77), and fail to account of historical change. He
seems to want to take a middle position where legal norms and
rules are "ranges of discourse" (97) which set
constraints on disputants as they argued over wealth and honor.
"Law and Arbitration in Renaissance Florence" argues
that the development of arbitration in the fifteenth century was
a "creative moment" in Florentine legal history.
Neither as "rule-centered" as litigation nor as
"fact-oriented as more informal mechanisms" (70),
arbitration allowed disputants to resolve differences without
going into the public sphere (litigation).
In Part 2 ("Family") Kuehn examines several case
studies to offer perspectives on the family that differ from the
prevailing historiographical consensus. For instance, in
"Honor and Conflict in a Fifteenth Century Florentine
Family," the author takes issue with the static notion he
associates primarily with the work of Gene Brucker and William
Kent that the family was a corporate unit characterized by a
marked degree of solidarity. Kuehn argues that tension and
conflict was endemic within the family, arising often out of
concerns to protect family honor. In this and other essays in
this section (especially in "A Reconsideration of Self-
Disciplining Pacts Among the Peruzzi of Florence"), the
author reiterates the theme that lineage solidarity was not as
clear-cut as historians have claimed (154). Rather, kinship was
actually a "cultural construct -- a language, an idiom"
(155) -- that could be manipulated to promote family interests.
"Reading Behind the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti's
DELLA FAMIGLIA in the Light of His Illegitimacy" discusses
the role of Alberti's concerns about the legal ambiguities of his
own illegitimacy in the composition of his important treatise on
the family.
The three essays that bring the collection to a close claim that
the status of women in fifteenth century Florence was not as
negative and as harsh as some historians (particularly Christiane
Klapisch) have proposed. "Women, Marriage, and Patria
Potestas in Late Medieval Florence" and "Some
Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the
Renaissance" underscore the lack of clarity in the law
regarding fifteenth century Florentine women. Fathers continued
to exercise some legal rights over their married daughters, and
women never lost all of the inheritance rights after the return
of the dowry several centuries earlier. In the essay, "'Cum
Consensu Mundualdi': Legal Guardianship of Women in Quattrocento
Florence," Kuehn argues
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that the institution of the "mundualdus" (a male
obligated by statute to be associated with a female for legal
transactions) was not always an instrument of male control (231).
A book of this brilliance and complexity will undoubtedly raise
some concerns and questions among its readers. Foremost in the
mind of this reviewer is the fact that the title ("Towards
an Anthropology of Renaissance Italy") and the intent set
forth in the Introduction ("to delineate problems about
Renaissance history") are somewhat misleading. This is not a
book about Renaissance Italy per se. It is a really book about
Florence. Indeed, a cursory glance of the index reveals few
references to other Italian cities (Bologna has one reference;
Venice has none). Recent research is increasingly revealing how
atypical Florentine history was, relative to other Italian
city-states. As Kuehn himself observes, the mundualdus (the
subject of Chapter 9) was uniquely Florentine.
I also felt that the author tends to offer overly schematic
characterizations of the theoretical positions with which he
disagrees. For example, in the Introduction, Chapter 1, and
Chapter 2, Kuehn seems to generalize about legal anthropologists
and "the so-called critical legal studies" [movement]
(page 290, note 9) in ways that skim over the differences that
exist between members of those traditions. An appreciation of the
differences among anthropologists does, however, appear in the
extensive notes that accompany the text (for example: 271, note
35; 290, note 9). Kuehn's approach to disputes also apparently
makes him reluctant to use the word "politics" in his
vision of the role of law in Florentine society. However, in
virtually every essay, we read about how litigants used the law
to promote their interests and manage "strategic resources
and social order" (257). To this reviewer, this is just
another way of acknowledging the importance of politics in legal
disputes.
I also have some doubts regarding some of his conclusions about
kinship. If kinship is a "cultural construct" (155), a
"language" (155), "frought (sic) with
ambiguities" (page 7) and conflict (page 139), then there
seems to be little room for love and affection. Indeed, it seems
to this reader that the strong sense of family honor that Kuehn
underscores in these essays must stem at least in part from ties
of affection and sentiment that also linked families together.
Any concerns I may have are very minor. Thomas Kuehn has done a
valuable service to the scholarly community by publishing
together these ten excellent studies. We historians of late
medieval and early modern Italy who use legal sources will always
owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude, and we eagerly await the
publication of his forthcoming book on bastards.
Copyright 1992