Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. In the Renaissance, jurists, humanists, and moralists began to theorize on the relations between people and property that formed the 'substance' of the family and what held it together over the years. Family property was a bundle of shared rights. This was most evident when brothers shared a household and enterprise, but it also faced overlapping claims from children and wives which the paterfamilias had to recognize. Thomas Kuehn explores patrimony in legal thought, and how property was inherited, managed and shared in Renaissance Italy. Managing a patrimony was not a simple task. This led to a complex and active conceptualization of shared rights, and a conscious application of devices in the law that could override liabilities and preserve the group, or carve out distinct shares for each member. This wide-ranging volume charts the ever-present conflicts that arose and were a constant feature of family life.

'Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy analyzes the family as part of the sharing economy at the intersection of law, property, and households in Renaissance Italy. It is an essential work for scholars seeking to understand the entangled development of individual legal rights amidst the increasing codification of family law and the evolving familial economy of medieval and Renaissance Italy.'

Caroline Castiglione - Brown University

'This important study features the creative tension between a legal environment oriented toward individuals and a social world that prized families and patrimonies. The writings of jurists who wrestled with this tension reveal a 'sharing economy,' a form of economic behavior whose existence upends our simple teleologies of gift and market.'

Daniel Lord Smail - Harvard University

'Was familia the fixed point of reference for Renaissance Italy’s patriarchal social order? Kuehn complicates and illuminates our understanding of it. The obsession with assembling and transferring property over generations came relatively late, with legal forms evolving to make patrimony, memory, and dignitas the very substance of family identity over time. Complex, fascinating, and necessary reading.'

Nicholas Terpstra - University of Toronto