From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law (review)

When death laid his icy hand on a married man, the future his relict could expect in Western countries was established by numerous aspects of law and contract that varied from town to country and from one nation to another. Nevertheless, all widows had some longstanding rights established by both religious and secular law. Literary and religious tropes on the widow have long produced a negative, ambiguous or misanthropic image that is hard to modify, even though historical widows came in many different types. Individual instances of clever or fortunate widows who parlayed their position and rose on a social and economic wave, and instances of widows whose prudent management saved the family fortunes have been identified, but were they common? To estimate the position of a widow in a society that preferred male authority and evaluate the overall success they had in maintaining the family after the death of a male head, what is needed are studies of groups of widows from a similar background whose relative success can be assessed. Since customary law, in particular, varied from place to place, it may be that a widow's opportunities were dependent on specific contexts. The outcome in one place might not have been duplicated elsewhere. Professor Lanza is contributing to our understanding in this area, by studying women who became 'maitresses' in the Paris guilds on their husbands' death. They were good bourgeoises who potentially had the resources to cope in a male mercantile world. If they failed then, prospects for the less well endowed were discouraging.

These widows were operating within a strong, traditional cultural structure that at all levels of society privileged the family above the individual. Lanza works carefully and systematically through the whole range of French legal sources, noting the complications of the widow's position, even before her husband had been lowered into the ground. Her thesis, unsurprisingly, is that property was the heart of a marriage; widows were not under male authority and had enforceable legal rights that disturbed gender norms. They were able to participate in the business world and resist male attempts to dominate them. She argues that individuals had, and used, the power to modify the contracts they signed so that they met their particular needs and so legal practice diverged from legal codes. People were able to alter legal documents as they needed, to meet their particular situations. This is particularly important in France as the crown was in dispute with the Catholic Church over the right of individuals to marry without parental consent and also attempted to regulate the financial implications of a widow's remarriage so that her children's expectations were protected.

Lanza's analysis of marriage contracts shows how some aspects of the law, especially customary law, were ignored while matters subject to negotiation between the families, such as the contribution of property to the community, were taken very seriously. In all this, the ideas of the church about widowhood were basically ignored. Nevertheless, her examination of a sample of wills and inventories drawn up for widows shows an attitude to religion that reflected an emotional and gendered acceptance of the sacred.

Lanza shows that there were limitations on the ways in which women, who had not been apprenticed, could participate in the life of a guild. She points out, though, that these women often had informal training and other skills, such as literacy and account keeping, that made their deficiencies less significant. Moreover, it was only the guilds of the Wine Inspectors and the Sword Masters that prohibited women from inheriting their husband's mastership. Widows did take up the masterships in every other guild and Lanza argues that they were well regarded and fully integrated in the guild structure, even though particular guilds like the Curriers and the Goldsmiths were more restrictive than others.

Lanza says...