Démanteler le patrimoine. Les femmes et les biens dans la Marseille médiévale

Dismantling the Patrimony: Women and Property in Medieval Marseille. D. L. Smail. The dowry in medieval Europe has long been understood to be one of the key provisions in a set of statutory regulations that conspired to disinherit daughters and preserve patrimonies within males lines of descent. Evidence from mid-fourteenth-century Marseille reveals that despite these legal norms, daughters at all social levels frequently enjoyed considerable rights in parental estates, although the coming of the plague appears to have generated new disinheriting strategies among the patriciate. Since much inherited wealth flowed through women's hands, familial properties were typically reformed in every generation out of the husband's and the wife's estates. Since husbands typically managed the joint estate, the principle that the wife was by virtue of her dowry the first creditor of an insolvent husband could even be used as a legal shelter in case of bankruptcy. Here, the dowry was serving as a tool not of disinheritance but rather of preservation.Smail Daniel Lord, Smail Kathleen, Duroselle-Melish Caroline. Démanteler le patrimoine. Les femmes et les biens dans la Marseille médiévale. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 52ᵉ année, N. 2, 1997. pp. 343-368