Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century

Anna Bellavitis is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Rouen-Normandy, Director of the Groupe de Recherche d’Histoire (GRHis EA3831) and Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Beatrice Zucca Micheletto is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge, and associated researcher at the Groupe de Recherche d’Histoire, University of Rouen-Normandy.

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

List of editors and contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: North versus South – gender, law and economic well-being in Europe in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries

ANNA BELLAVITIS AND BEATRICE ZUCCA MICHELETTO

PART I

Laws

1 Community of goods, coverture and capability in Britain: Scotland versus England

DEBORAH SIMONTON

2 Between parental power and marital authority: How merchant women stood the test of customary laws in Brittany in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries

NICOLE DUFOURNAUD

3 Exceptional women: Female merchants and working women in Italy in the early modern period

SIMONA FECI

4 Married women’s property rights in the nineteenth century in France and Spain: A North–South case study

MARION RÖWEKAMP

5 From legal diversity to centralization: Marriage and wealth in nineteenth-century Greece

EVDOXIOS DOXIADIS

PART II

Family strategies or marital economies?

6 Marriage, law and property: Married noblewomen’s role in property management in fifteenth-century Norway

SUSANN ANETT PEDERSEN

7 Class privileges and the public good: The monti dei maritaggi in early modern Naples

VITTORIA FIORELLI

8 Women of high- and medium-ranking officers in the Île-de-France between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: What economic agency?

CLAIRE CHATELAIN

9 Undivided brothers – renouncing sisters: Family strategies of low nobility in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tyrol

SIGLINDE CLEMENTI

PART III

Inside the urban economy

10 The ‘egalitarian trend’ in practice: Female participation in capital markets in late medieval Leuven

ANDREA BARDYN

11 Women and credit in eighteenth-century Venice: A preliminary analysis

MATTEO POMPERMAIER

12 Married women, property and paraphernalia in early modern Scotland

REBECCA MASON

13 Women at work in a Southern European town: Women, guilds and commercial partnerships in Venice in the sixteenth century

EMILIE FIORUCCI

14 Law, wives and the marital economy in sixteenth-century Antwerp: Bridging the gap between theory and practice

KAAT CAPPELLE

15 Women, law and business formation in early modern Paris

JANINE M. LANZA

16 Bankruptcies, a gateway to gender history: The example of women book traders in Paris in the nineteenth century

VIERA REBOLLEDO-DHUIN

Index