BOOK: Annette Caroline CREMER, ed., Gender, Law and Material Culture Immobile Property and Mobile Goods in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2020). ISBN 9780367371777, £34.99

(Source: Routledge)

Routledge is publishing a new book on immobile property and mobile goods in Early Modern Europe.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This interdisciplinary volume discusses the division of the early modern material world into the important legal, economic and personal categories of mobile and immobile property, possession and the rights to usufruct.

The essays describe and compare different modes of acquisition and inter-generational transfer via law and custom. The varying perspectives, including cultural history, legal history, social and economic history, philosophy and law, allows for a more nuanced understanding of the links between the movability of an object and the gender of the person who owned, possessed or used it. Case studies and examples come from a wide geographical range including Norway, Scotland, Italy, Tyrol, Greece, Romania, Brazil, Jamaica and the English colonies. By covering both urban and rural areas and exploring all social groups, from ruling elites to the lower strata of society, the essays offer fresh insight into the division of mobile and immobile property that socially and economically posed disadvantages for women.

By exploring a broad scope of topics including landownership, marriage contracts, slaveholding and the dowry, this book is an essential resource for both researchers and students of women’s history, social and economic history and material culture.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annette Caroline Cremer is an Assistant Professor at the History Faculty at Giessen University, Germany. She has published several books in the field of material culture research, European cultural history in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, court culture and gender history.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Gender, Law and Material Culture

Annette Caroline Cremer

2. Early modern political philosophy on rights of ownership

Amelie Stuart

Part 1: Gifts, Symbolic values and Strategies

3. Real Estates as Marital Gifts. Women and Landownership in 15th century Norway

Susann Anett Pedersen

4. Married Women's Testaments: Division and Distribution of Moveable Property in Seventeenth-Century Glasgow

Rebecca Mason

5. Hybrid legal Cultures among the Early Modern Tyrolean Nobility. Marriage Contracts and the symbolic Value of Assets

Siglinde Clementi

Part 2: Women's Access to immobile Property

6. Fenced in or out? Women and Landownserhip in early modern southern Tyrol

Janine Maegraith

7. Women, Land and Usufruct in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire: A Caste Study of Vidin and Antakya

Fatma Gül Karagöz

Part 3: Women, Law and Property in colonial contexts

8. In Her Own Right. Gender, Slaveholding, and Moveable Goods in Colonial Jamaica

Christine Walker

9. Land, Slaves and Honour - Women's Ownership and Possession in Colonial Brazil (Paraíba) 

Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva

Part 4: Women and Property in transitory Zones

10. Women and Movable Goods in Maritime Border Economy in 19th century Sicily (Aeolian Islands)

Ida Fazio

11. Stamp duty and the transformation of the dowry in 19th century Greece

Evdoxios Doxiadis

12. Starting a Married Life. Women and Goods in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Romanian Towns of Piteși and Câmpulung

Nicoleta Roman

Part 5: Synthesis

13. Movable Goods and Immovable Property - Interrelated Perspectives

Margareth Lanzinger

More info here