Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
WOMEN AND MEN IN HISTORY
This series, published for students, scholars and interested general readers, will tackle themes in gender history from the early medieval period through to the present day. Gender issues are now an integral part of all history courses and yet many traditional texts do not reflect this change. Much exciting work is now being done to redress the gender imbalances of the past, and we hope that these books will make their own substantial contribution to that process. This is an open-ended series, which means that many new titles can be included. We hope that these will both synthesise and shape future developments in gender studies.
The General Editors of the series are Patricia Skinner (University of Southampton) for the medieval period; Pamela Sharpe (University of Bristol) for the early modern period; and Penny Summerfield (University of Lancaster) for the modern period. Margaret Walsh (University of Nottingham) was the Founding Editor of the series.
Published books:
Masculinity in Medieval Europe
D.M. Hadley (ed.)
Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy
Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (eds)
Gender, Church and State in Early Modern Germany: Essays by Merry E. Wiesner
Merry E. Wiesner
Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage
Elizabeth W. Foyster
Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution in the Metropolis 17301830
Tony Henderson
Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 17601860
Ruth Watts
Women and Work in Russia, 18801930: A Study in Continuity through Change
Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar
The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 18301960
Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden
More than Munitions: Women, Work and the Engineering Industries 19001950
Clare Wightman
First published 1999 by Pearson Education Limited
Published 2014 by Routledge
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Copyright 1999, Taylor & Francis.
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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-31748-2 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Widowhood in medieval and early modern Europe / edited by Sandra
Cavallo and Lyndan Warner.
p. cm. (Women and men in history)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-582-31748-7 (ppr). ISBN 0-582-31747-9 (csd)
1. WidowhoodEuropeHistory. 2. WidowsEuropeHistory.
3. WidowersEuropeHistory. I. Cavallo, Sandra. II. Warner,
Lyndan. III Series.
HQ1058.5.E97W53 1999
305.489654094dc21
9852954
CIP
Contents
Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner
Julia Crick
Margaret Pelling
Patricia Skinner
Barbara J. Todd
Lyndan Warner
Elizabeth Foyster
Isabelle Chabot
Amy Louise Erickson
Dagmar Freist
Jodi Bilinkoff
Tim Stretton
Giulia Calvi
Pamela Sharpe
Guide
We would like to thank former colleagues at the University of Exeter, Julia Crick and Tim Rees, for their help in the initial stages of this project - back in the days when it was an idea for a symposium. We would also like to thank David Vassberg, a speaker at the Widowhood: Conditions and Constructions Symposium, for generously allowing the citation of his unpublished work in the Introduction.
Lyndan is grateful to members of the History Department at the University of Warwick, especially Colin Jones, for making it such a stimulating and wonderful place to work, and to the Department of History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand for giving her the time to do some of the writing and editing. We would also like to thank Tim Stretton for helping us to english (as they used to say in the early modern period) some of the chapters.
J ODI B ILINKOFF earned her PhD from Princeton University in 1983. She is the author of The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca, NY, 1989; paperback 1992) and a number of essays and articles exploring religion, gender and authority in early modern Spain. She is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.
G IULIA C ALVI teaches History at the University of Siena. She is the author of II Contratto Morale, Madri e Figli nella Toscana Moderna (Rome, 1994). Her book Stoe di un Anno di Peste (Milan, 1984) was translated as Histoes of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). She is the editor of Barocco al Femminile (Rome, 1992) and co-editor with Isabelle Chabot of Le Richezze Delle Donne. Diritti Patrimoniali e Poteri Familiari (XIIIXIX sec.) (Turin, 1998).
S ANDRA C AVALLO is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and their Motives in Turin 15411789 (Cambridge, 1995) and of numerous articles on poor relief and health care, family and gender relations in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italy.
I SABELLE C HABOT is Research Fellow at the University of Florence. She has published many articles on women and widowhood in edited collections and journals such as Quaderni Storici and Continuity and Change. She is currently preparing her book La Dette des Familles: Femmes, Lignages et Patrimoine Florence aux XLVe et XVe sicles and is co-editor with Giulia Calvi of Le Richezze Delle Donne. Diritti Patrimoniali e Poteri Familiari (XIII-XIX sec.) (Turin, 1998).
J ULIA C RICK is Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. She has published articles on female religious communities and on womens and family property in pre-Conquest England. She has authored two volumes on Geoffrey of Monmouths Historia Regum Btanniae (Cambridge, 1989 and 1991). Her article Women, post-humous benefaction, and family strategy in pre-Conquest England is forthcoming in Journal of Btish Studies.
