Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300-1600

Thomas Kuehn has a PhD from the University of Chicago, and has been teaching at Clemson University, South Carolina since 1981. He has published four books: Emancipation in Late Medieval Florence (1982), Law, Family, and Women (1991), Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence (2002), and Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (2008), which won the Marraro prize of the American Historical Association and was made possible by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Kuehn has also published over forty articles and book chapters.

• Acknowledgments; List of jurists; Consilia; Statutes; Introduction. Families, culture, and law in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600; 1. Family in law and culture; 2. Gender in law and culture; 3. Family life and the laws; 4. Household: marriage and married life; 5. Inheritance: intestacy; 6. Inheritance: testaments; 7. Paternalism: family and state; 8. Crisis of family and succession?; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

'This book is a fascinating study of law as a living thing in Renaissance Italy. As Kuehn demonstrates with his characteristic mastery, the elaborate provisions of substantive law were inadequate to the complexities posed by real families. Family law, accordingly, was constantly made and remade by the jurists operating at the interface between doctrine and practice.' Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University, Massachusetts