Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au xvie siècle (review)

Bellavitis has written numerous essays about Venetian family life and a book about marriage and social mobility among that city's cittadini (citizens). In this new study, she takes a broader perspective, considering not only cittadini but also humbler social groups and looking beyond marriage to inheritance.

Famille, genre, transmission is divided into two parts. Bellavitis first tackles the law—family governance, succession law, rules about restitution of dowry to widows, and guardianship of minor children after the death of their father. These chapters rely heavily on a secondary literature for Venice and other cities and on the 1244 statutes of Venice and an eighteenth-century compilation of statutory "corrections." On its face, this hardly seems a new approach nor are her findings overtly innovative. But Bellavitis offers something rare and important; too often other scholars study the topics that her chapters cover as if the rules were simply an unchanging backdrop to historical actions and social patterns. Bellavitis' more diachronic and comparative approach prevents such a mistakenly passive sense of law. She makes absolutely clear, for example, that the father–son relationship was the pivot around which intestate succession rules worked; hence, succession needed no probate and was immediate.

In the first part of the book, Bellavitis employs court records from 1592 to 1595 to examine the statistical frequency of certain inheritance patterns. Intestate successions led to generalized and dispersed distributions for women's estates but concentrated and gendered transmission of men's. Widows' claims for their dowries met with delays and eventual payouts only loosely related at times to the contractual amounts, but courts enforced those claims, just as they enforced testamentary clauses putting widows in charge of their minor children.

The second part of the book rests on the study of several hundred testaments of middling sorts of people—artisans, merchants, and professionals—who were neither wealthy nor, conversely, poor and thus unconcerned with transmission. As testaments worked modifications on the usual rules of transmission, this section is less about law and more about choices, but within legal and societal expectations. Bellavitis separates the testaments of men from those of women, thus allowing her to show in each class how women shifted their property by a particularized sense of needs and relationships in both natal and marital families.

In each chapter, Bellavitis provides statistical tables of heirs and executors of different types of testators. The total numbers are not large. The major difficulty is the lack of a single table in each chapter to present a statistical overview. That said, Bellavitis succeeds in showing how these classes in which women worked—often as part of a family shop, with dowries more constitutive of the household—used the same legal devices that patricians used in different ways to suit their interests and needs. Modest artisans or merchants had little need or sense to devising the kind of multigenerational substitutions that were essential in patricians wills, though they used them from time to time. Men and women of these classes left bequests to illegitimates, relatives, and favorite charities. Merchants' wills sought to prevent morcelization of estates that underlay family-based firms. Testators who were notaries or officials were concerned to transmit not only property but also a nonmaterial inheritance of education and comportment.

Bellavitis' sense of generational transmission is properly expansive. Beyond the settlement of property on survivors (or determining which among them received what), the transmission of social responsibilities, family roles, and education were at stake in drawing up a testament, as Bellavitis is able to show only because she first lays out the norms of intestate succession and family membership. She has both added social nuance and context to Venetian history and a useful pattern of analysis to be taken to other early modern societies, in and out of Italy.