1 - Introduction

Summary

In late medieval and Renaissance Italian societies, family was conceived as a quasi-corporate entity, continuing across generations. But in law ownership was conceived as an attribute of individuals, and generally of only one person in a household, the paterfamilias. Legal experts worked to accommodate legal notions to the realities of family life, which were close to what anthropologists have come to term an economy of sharing (with multiple and overlapping rights). Law thus came to provide instruments that helped perpetuate families or terminate them. It fell to the paterfamilias to manage property and use legal instruments to do so in order that the patrimony, substantia, could be transmitted to the next generation.