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.