Ecrire sa mort, decrire sa vie: testaments de laics lausannois (1400-1450) (review)

Écrire sa mort, décire sa vie is a close study of 180 testamentary records issued by 139 lay testators during the first half of the fifteenth-century in Lausanne. It builds on the valuable studies of marital property and inheritance law in the region by Poudret, as well as a recent analysis of wills surviving from Lausanne during the previous century.¹ The book proceeds patiently and cautiously, systematically discussing the nature of the records themselves, their probable relationship to the population of the city, the documents' form, and their relationship to the customary law in which they so purposefully intervened. Appended to the narrative analysis is a useful edition of twelve wills, apparently chosen to illustrate the range of uses to which a will could be put, along with a translation from the original Latin into modern French.

Despite her caveats about the thinness of the documentary record and the distortions to it resulting from the incommensurability of the sources (a significant portion of the records come from the minute books of a single notary during a short period in the half century), the author nevertheless uncovers a few general—if unsurprising—patterns. Testators were, by and large, privileged people with the means to make special bequests and worry about their patrimony, or able to pay fees for a special burial. Most chose to be buried where they lived and with those to whom they were related, to support local charities, and to confine their bequests to a fairly close circle of family, neighbors, and local ecclesiastics. All of these patterns, the author suggests, reflect a social conservatism born of a weak economy, demographic crises, and the small city's political vulnerability. In that context, people who were able, she concludes, used the will to claim social place, map social connections, and express civic loyalty.

Écrire sa mort seems to be a graduate thesis, and it displays both the strengths and weaknesses of that genre. It is sound methodologically and, just as important, transparent about method and sources. But it is positioned against a thin base of secondary literature that is narrowly focused on local studies or traditional French scholarship on the will, and it seldom ventures beyond a flat-footed recitation of the "results" obtained by posing a series of individually considered questions. In numbing detail, following paths forged by other scholars, the author reports everything that she could find out about the age, profession, health, gender, and marital status of testators; the choice of parish, mendicant convent, or cathedral as place of burial (cemetery, church itself, or cloister); the kinds of alms given to particular charities; the donations to churches and priests for masses; and so on. Although the occasional comment links the variables together, the book does not attempt to quantify these connections, leaving questions about, for example, the precise relationship between gender, wealth, marital and parental status, choice of burial pace, and patterns of giving.

Even more disappointing, the book does not seriously pursue what the author herself identifies as one of the will's chief purposes—the rearrangement of customary inheritance. As she explains, custom in this region granted men the right to dispose of their property by will and to choose heirs, requiring only that a "légitime" equal to one-half of the patrimony be left to all children. (Childless men could will all their property.) To judge from the few examples that Lavanchy provides, fathers regularly used this opportunity to disinherit daughters (excepting their part in the légitime), leaving all of their disposable property to sons. Daughters thereby lost property rights, but they simultaneously benefited from custom's provision that they have full testamentary rights to their dowries. Thus, a daughter "disinherited" but well dowered might have gained independent property rights that more than offset the loss suffered by the "disinheritance." It seems odd that the author...