Thomas Kuehn

This book studies family life and gender within Italy through the lens of law and legal disputes.

Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300-1600

Drawing on a broad range of sources in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic this book offers a new interpretation of late Ottoman imperial rule in Yemen and situates the Ottoman Empire among competing imperial powers in the long nineteenth century.

Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919

Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference

Anne Jacobson Schutte

Silvana Seidel Menchi

Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra Medioevo ed età moderna

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formative influence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance, especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's use of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling image of the social processes that affected the shape and function of the law. The numerous law courts of Italian city-states constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the permutations of these laws, then examines their use by Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage, business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as illegitimate, Law, Family, and Women provides fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions, often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He examines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardian for women—in Florence, the control of fathers over their married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to both legal anthropologists and social historians. Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson University.

Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy

Law, Family, and Women

This collection offers a variety of approaches to aspects of women’s lives. It moves beyond men’s prescriptive pronouncements about female nature to women's lived experiences, replacing the singular woman with plural women and illuminating female agency. The contributors show that women’s lives changed over the life course and differed according to region and social class. They also demonstrate that in the early modern period the largely private spaces in women’s lives were not enclosed worlds isolated from the public spaces in which men operated. Contributors to this important collection are leading international scholars and offer strong, substantial, and archival-based research.

Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe

An investigation of the complex social and legal issues surrounding illegitimate offspring in Renaissance Florence

Thomas Kuehn

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