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Thomas Kuehn, "Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
00:47:15
An interview with Thomas Kuehn
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Thomas Kuhn, Professor Emeritus at Clemson University, to discuss his new book, Patrimony and Law in Renaissance, out 2022 with Cambridge University Press. Hello, Tom, and welcome to the program.
- [00:25]
B
Hello. Thank you. Good to be on.
- [00:27]
A
Thanks. It's really nice. I'm really appreciative that you take the time to chat with me. So how are you today? Are you enjoying your emeritus status?
- [00:36]
B
Yes, I keep busy, keep writing some stuff. Got a few articles in press, so, you know, do what I can.
- [00:43]
A
Absolutely. And lots of, you know, and there's. There are other things to life as well, not just Renaissance history, so enjoy those. You're like, okay, so our first job today is to put this in your intellectual trajectory and kind of figure out where this fits for you. So you are the author of Emancipation in Late medieval Florence, Rutgers, 1982. Law, family and Women Towards Illegal Anthropology, Renaissance Italy, That's Chicago Press, 1994. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence, Michigan, 2002. I pored over both of those continually while I was writing my dissertation, by the way. Very important books for me. And Heirs can and Creditors, Repudiation of Inheritance in Renaissance Florence, Cambridge, 2008, as well as numerous articles in the same vein. And I see some fairly clear threads running through there. Is it fair to characterize you as an historian of the interaction between people, families and law?
- [01:41]
B
That's certainly been a theme there from the start. Yes. Especially the law part of it, because I was always impressed by the fact that most of the documents that you could find in the archives to explain these issues of family interaction are themselves legal. And that throws us sometimes very thick and opaque veneer over what people are thinking and doing. But you've got to wade through that to get to things. And that was true from the start. Still is.
- [02:13]
A
Yeah. Okay. So your first book, I'm guessing, can came out of your dissertation, and I see a lot of, like, archival work since. How did you land on this topic?
- [02:25]
B
More or less from sitting around talking with my dissertation advisor, Julius Kirschner, at the University of Chicago, and he had various ideas about things that could be done, and he suggested I look into emancipation. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, this is fascinating because this is about taking the fairly absolute power of a father in Roman law, and then he gives it up, emancipates A child from under that. And the reason or reasons, you know, were intriguing. So I dove on that it also helped that because it was a legal device that raised the possibilities of fraud and deception, the Florentines registered these things. So it always helps if you got one big source you can go to and sort of, hey, I know how many people through all these years actually went through this.
- [03:27]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's very nice. And. And then you just continue to spend a lot of time in the archives. Right. You've been an. An archive dweller for a long time.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah. When I'm in Florence, I tend to be something of an archive rat. I get there when it opens, I stay practically till it closes and. And, you know, get. Get as much as I can. And especially when you're dealing with something like the Emancipation Registry, which ran to, if I remember correctly, 17 volumes. You know, you could take data down from each one, so you spend some time with it each day because it's kind of boring, you know, especially. Especially in. In the 70s when I was working on the Emancipation Book and you didn't have a. Computers and things that go on now, you know, later working on a similar registry with Repudiation of Inheritance, I had a laptop there, and I'm just, you know, clicking through a database and filling in holes and moving on to the next one.
- [04:25]
A
So much faster. Yeah. My last trip in, I took pictures of a document, which was that, too.
- [04:31]
B
Last time I was there. I can still pull it up on my phone.
- [04:35]
A
It's. Yeah, me too. It's so wild. As opposed to back, you know, back when I was doing my dissertation, I had a computer, but I had to type in everything. Right?
- [04:43]
B
Everything. Yeah.
- [04:44]
A
Transcribed all these records. It's. So I don't know if it's. I don't know if it's better because, you know, I don't know what I have. And I knew it. I had it cold in this way back then that I don't know, but.
- [04:53]
B
I know I've gone back into some of that stuff, you know, related to later work. And I keep going that database going, what the hell does this mean? What was that about? You know, I got to remind myself where my head was almost 20 years ago.
- [05:10]
A
Yeah, sure. And then. And the other thing is, when you, you know, you. That's still useful. Those. That's still a great source, you know, you're still kind of mining that. So how did you come to patrimony and law in Renaissance Italy?
- [05:25]
B
Basically, I started with patrimony and law. It's I can say in a way that that's been what my research career has been about in different forms. You know, emancipation gave a child the ability to start accumulating his own patrimony, as it were. He no longer acquired for his father. So. But that's also true. When the father died, the expectation was that he's still going to get. The emancipated kid will still get property. Depending, of course, if they're brothers, sisters. All the complications that come in on illegitimacy, you're dealing with a bunch of related people who are essentially excluded. The biggest single reason or the area of law involving illegitimacy is about inheritance rights, or lack thereof, really. So it's. It's all built up, you know, to the same degree. I was struck always by the fact that on one hand you find all sorts of statements that make it look like a father of a family controls all the property, all the income. And yet, as I'm trying to show in, in the book, sons have prerogatives on these things. Mothers clearly have a prerogative in the dowry. You find brothers even living together who are hashing out all sorts of issues between them and on from there.
- [06:57]
A
I see also, and this is from my. I'm curious very much. This is fulfilled. And answering my question, I see that you worked in Florence, but also Milan and then in the Vatican. And what did you find there, the Vatican?
- [07:12]
B
What I did is essentially deal with legal sources, the writings of jurists. And in that situation, actually I was able to do a lot of work at St. Louis University, which has all of this stuff on microfilm and was nicely convenient because I'm spooling a microfilm. And then I could actually save an image to a thumb drive and accumulate my own little archive of legal documents, which is on a thumb drive somewhere here. Milan was mainly as a result of being asked to contribute to a volume on the history of Milan about women. And in that situation, actually, people in Milan procured a few documents for me to go through that.
- [08:06]
A
So I want to talk about. There are a few points of this that I want to talk about. I've been trying thinking how we walk through your book that works best for our listeners. So just I think that we start here, which is the conception of family, who was included, how it worked, like what met, what family indicated was very different 500 years ago.
- [08:27]
B
Oh, yeah. Much more complex than you would think. It would be simple to say, well, it's these people who are related by marriage and blood. And maybe they live together in these. And sure, those factors are all operative in this situation. But you find out, for instance, that as I'm pointing out, familia, the Latin term at first is in fact referring to gang of slaves. It's about, you know, the kind of control one has over people, property, etc. In the. In the owner of these things. Then you get into, well, in. In the 15th and 16th centuries, as people are turning to trusts. The fide commissum is a way of locking property across generations. One key clause to these trusts is, of course, that you're not. The heir is not allowed to alienate the property. Extra familia outside the family. At that point, we. Who's in the family becomes a matter of real concern with, you know, surprising. You know, your mother's not part of the family. You know, I mean, that's maybe one of the. The most astounding things. And yet she's not in legal terms, she's from someone else's family. She may be your mother and all that, but she's technically not. And the other connections through her, her sister, her brother or whatever, are also not part of your family. Though for us, in our view, this. Oh, yeah, if they get together on the 4th of July in reunions, they must be family, right?
- [09:56]
A
Absolutely. All these people living in your home who aren't family, and then you have family who's living in someone else's home.
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B
All of that, or in other communities, you know, so you get the. The whole problem of people who claim to be Florentine but live in Padua or something like that, because they're pursuing business. But then the issues of inheritance crop up and, and people attempt to deny them property they would inherit in Florence on the grounds that they're not Florentine. You know, there's a case I'm. I'm working on and been working for a while about actually involves the Pazzi family just before the conspiracy. And. And they are attempting to secure part of an inheritance from Giovanni Borrome, whose daughter is married to one of the Pazzi, and that's his only surviving child. His son had died, but Giovanni wanted the property to go to his nephews and, you know, be part of the Borrome say, the whole issue right there. Who's part of this family? Yeah. And one of the arguments made against him was, well, you lived in Padua, you're not really Florentine, so you don't get to, To. To cite this statute saying that you are, you know, now ahead of your. Or the cousins. Are ahead of the daughter in claiming property and the borrow may. That's a lot of property.
- [11:27]
A
Yeah, that's. That's quite a pop. That's quite a family. Although it's not going to go very well if it goes to people involved in the Potsy, as it turns out. But that's.
- [11:35]
B
Yeah, so. And the Borrome, you know, basically, while I can talk about the legal aspects and these arguments about do. Are they ahead of the daughter and so forth, it gets down to politics in that situation, because whatever else happens, the motor may clearly have Medici on their side, you know, and, yeah, they got to work out some taxes that were owed and all of that, but, you know, that's just a good old Florentine practice anyway.
- [12:06]
A
Right. Yeah. So we've got this one crux, which is how people. We have this corporate body, really, that is the family and how people see themselves there. And then. Then there is the law. So what is, what does that mean in this period? Who. What kind of bodies are overseeing the maintenance of family inheritance? Who's the power there?
- [12:26]
B
Most all that's still within the family. It's. It's, you know, who's the patriarch? You kind of look at the situation of Alberti's dialogue on family and then these people interacting through this and who's sort of the. The voice in the family that matters and hovering over that. I mean, Alberti had, you know, education and law and all that. He knew those distinctions. So. And there's the issue of. Of the. The government, the town, a place like Florence and most other communities. The government sees part of its role is to preserve the wealth of its citizens. And, you know, the wealthy citizens preserve their wealth. In fact, of course, wealth is much more volatile, you know, across the generations or even across just a few years. And you can see people's fortunes go up and down. Giovanni Rucellai is a great example of that. Earlier in his life, he's feeling good. He's married a kid into the Medici and all that. By the end of his life, when he writes Zibaldone to his sons, his advice to them, he said, stay away from politics. You know, he clearly lost a lot of money at that point. He had to sell his villa outside the city to Lorenzo de Medici. So, you know, that's going on. But government also will seemingly step in in some situations and say, well, that's our role. We're supposed to keep people in their wealth. That the city is, in that sense, the body of families, you know, that make it up.
- [13:58]
A
So this all feels like there's a lot of space for conflict and.
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B
Some.
- [14:07]
A
Problems as well as. As well as communication and collaboration.
- [14:11]
B
Oh, yeah, there is a lot of conflict. You see. I mean, again, you go to an Alberti and there's this, this kind of idyllic view that all the Alberti family get along and they pay attention to their elders and they've always been, you know, and in fact, you look at what happens in the Alberti or any number of families, and they split sides in political disputes. There are sometimes quiet but nonetheless fearsome arguments over inheritance. I mean, of all the things, you know, that, that inheritance point is one point in which wealth will shift hands and no one can be passive in that situation. And in some situations, like an attempt of an illegitimate child to claim inheritance, there's sort of nothing lost by contesting that. There's enough arguments on either side. I mean, some of the going to court is a kind of crapshoot. They don't know, you know, which argument's going to carry. There's no precedent, you know, rule of precedent in Roman law. So the whole kind of situation can be re litigated by another group of people in another situation. And the lawyers, like Francesco Guicciardini is a great example of this. Just as every situation is peculiar, indifferent, and you listen to that and make a decision. So there's a lot of fighting that can go on. There's. There's a reason Florence was full of notaries, among other things, that supposed to help record things and keep these problems from happening, or bring their. Test their texts out and prove what supposedly was done, you know.
- [15:57]
A
Yeah. And we, I gotta say, that's heaven for an art, for a. For an historian, just heaven for an archival historian. It's right there waiting for you. All right, so let's get into a little bit kind of deeper, more specifics here. Tell our listeners about the famous jurist Bartolos of Sassoferrato and how he thought of the family and its patrimony.
- [16:21]
B
Barglis comes he a brilliant lawyer, and he comes at a point. He was born in 1313, died young in 1357 or 58. There's some argument of exactly what day it happened. At a point where the legal profession has taken care of the texts, the glossaders, who, you know, have harmonized every part of the book and seemingly created a situation where you can read the text. But the next issue is what's the relationship between this law and what goes out on the streets, especially as city states become larger and more sophisticated and produce their own statutes. And what's the relationship of these statutes to the Roman law, which in essence turns out to be a kind is referred to as the common law. It's a legal background. And on top of that, each city fashions different laws which modify, you know, or sometimes rule out pieces of the Romans, Roman and canon civil law. You know, most famously, most the cities of Italy required that a dowered woman could only have the dowry as inheritance from a father, brother, etc. Whereas Roman law said she gets an equal share with all other siblings. That clearly changed, you know, the basic civil law. Well, here's where people like Bartalas are being called into court to give an answer to these kinds of questions about, well, and what do we do? You know, what about this kind of property that wasn't dowry? Those kinds of questions arise. Bartolos was a teacher, professor of law. He was also frequently called in on cases and in his lectures, his commentaries on the various parts of the Roman law, he uses and refers to cases, he sat on cases, he heard of things that are going on in. In his case, Perugia is sort of the place where these things bubble up. And he makes so many connections of different sorts. You know, he's constantly cited by the legal historians for, you know, this and that and the other thing he did. Incredible when, you know, the guy dies and he's 43 in an age of quill pens and all that. I mean, it's not like he was banging this out on his IBM either. And then with regard to family and this, this, I guess the second chapter of the book, he had famously said basically that family is substance. You know, substance is a very nicely imprecise word.
- [19:25]
A
Yeah, I don't know what that means.
- [19:27]
B
Yeah, it has, it has. No, you can't find a legal definition of it. You can find some definitions of family. You can't find any of substance. Your first implications say that's wealth, that's property, that's a house and land and stuff. But then you realize, no, it also can be the indistinct, non material things that are part of family. The last name, the coat of arms, the sense of honor of the people in the family, the people they're related to, married to work with, et cetera. And all of that in some sense is the substance that moves from one generation to the next. And Bartalas is talking about family in that substantial sense. Precisely in commenting on a text which deals with the questions of inheritance from father to son and in fact says that, that father and son are so much alike and so much involved with each other that they are effectively owners of the property together. And he says, yeah, okay, dad's got, you know, he says, et cetera. But still the. The son is a sort of owner. So when the father dies, the passage of family of the property to the son is automatic and instantaneous. And it doesn't require a formal act of acceptance of the property, although it would help if you did, because you get the dates down. Whereas for inheritance by anyone else, brother of the deceased, even daughters, etc. They would have to go to a notary and effectively express their desire to take over their share of so and so's property.
- [21:14]
A
All right, and then this is kind of the dominant understanding, right, Moving forward.
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B
Yes. And clearly it's. It's the paradigmatic case, father to son transmission. Right. The problem, of course, is mortality and plagues and things like that get in the way.
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A
Right. So it doesn't always work out so smoothly.
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B
Definitely not great.
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A
So tell me how this can go wrong. Like, sons have. Sons have their own stuff.
- [21:43]
B
Sons can have their own stuff. One of the problems that goes on is determining if a son goes out and, you know, he's been apprenticed in some kind of trade, father's giving him some money, he travels and earns money, you know, and in Roman law, the sense would be while he's earning money, so that goes to his father. Because unless he's emancipated. Of course he's emancipated. He supposedly keeps it. So there's this interesting dynamic. And it's not so much expressed in the law is, but it is in courts about the industry, the effort of the son should be recognized and rewarded, you know, and in that regard, even though he's operating with capital that may have come from his father, since he's produced something here. And then there are various forms of property that the son could otherwise gain. If he's a soldier and he gets paid as a mercenary, that's his. And that goes back into Roma. If he's a. If he goes in the clergy, then, you know, whatever his income is from benefits or whatever is his, of course, he's in a monastery, then belongs to the abbot, of course.
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A
And then he can also marry. If he doesn't go into a monastery and his wife brings a dowry.
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B
Right. And that becomes, you know, then the question is, is he living with his wife independently or is he living with his wife in his father's house and he's not emancipated? So in that case, the, the father supposedly has legal control of the daughter in law's dowry, though the husband seemingly should have something to say about it. Sure.
- [23:33]
A
And it's legally still hers.
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B
It is, it is hers in, in a sense that she has ownership, but it's a passive ownership. She does not have active control in day to day management of, of the substance of her dowry that goes to her husband. Well, as I said, if he's living with his father, you know, dad will be running it supposedly.
- [23:59]
A
Okay, so you've got this whole situation and then of course there are multiple sons.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you find occasionally, you know, and you can locate them in the Florentine catasto, the unique sorcerer. You had all these households laid out. You can find some of these situations where there's a kind of older patriarch with, you know, a dozen or more people in the household, married sons with their wife and a kid or two and maybe a slave and, you know, a widowed sister. And there's all sorts of dynamic that can go on in a house and all that gets more complex. Who's really running this show?
- [24:42]
A
Yeah, okay, so who's really running this show?
- [24:47]
B
What you can't tell from say a catasto reports will say, you know, okay, father, you know, maybe 70 or something like that is, it's in his name. So the pretense of the, the catastrophe record is that he's in charge. But is he okay? The sons are probably in their 40s. You know, dad's health may not be good. The sons may be driving the business. You don't know about the connections? Well, you might know some connections from that catastrophe report because they'll talk about who owes them money, who they owe money to, you know, how they accumulated certain pieces of property, but you don't know. But the people they interact with, you know, business partners may be controlling more than they're controlling, depending how the business runs.
- [25:40]
A
So what can, what are legal, what kind of legal mechanisms are in place to protect the family wealth?
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B
The biggest ones are those that deal with inheritance in some fashion, including the trust, which is devised really within the Roman law, because that's where the notion of defeat communism first comes from. As I try to point out, a number of cities look askance at this kind of device because there and in a lot of other instances, the possibilities for fraud, cheating are enormous and they're very aware of them.
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A
Real quick, what's the fidecumism?
- [26:29]
B
Fidecumisum is a Roman device that allowed someone to direct property through one person. To another. So the first person is the trustee or the faith is in that person to pass on the property to this next usually carefully designated person. What happens in the Renaissance and after is that the extension of those controls goes past four generations and could be seemingly indefinite. Yeah. And that is especially carried by the use of the clause that the property, certain, sometimes very specific name pieces is not to go outside the family. And that situation means that, for instance, here's where you would worry about the feed of chemism. The property is bound through this device to go to the next person. Someone who's a creditor comes forward and says, you owe me. You know, there's this contract, I'm owed this money. They say, we don't have it, you know, because we can't take this. It goes to the next in line that's been packaged up. And so here you have a creditor, you know, being screwed by that system and so that, you know, they have to, they hope to. At one point, Florentines proposed registering all of these devices in some central fashion. It would have taken them forever. I mean, they'd have to cut down forests, get enough paper to, to record all of that sort of stuff, which could change on a daily basis. But the other devices, like I said, emancipation is, is another device that's regulated because of the possibilities of fraud. Because the world sees the sun going in and out of the house. And this, oh, he's, he's dad's son. You expect this, you're going by that, you know, he should be right. Then you suddenly going, I want, you know, he owes me money. And they say, well, no, he's emancipated. His property is his own. It's not bound for the father's debts anymore. You know, that's why they had to register it. So at least, you know, we call it due diligence. You're going to enter in a contract with someone, you go run to the plots of Echo and you go in and these are supposed to be consultable and go in and ask to see these and have someone tell you if, if so and so has been emancipated or not.
- [29:10]
A
That that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. So fraud can be rampant and you have this. But also you have this system that's in place to kind of protect some of members of some members of the family who do not have control over the funds. Right. Maintain family wealth and the wealth of others.
- [29:30]
B
I mean, you're, you're dealing with the debt out there. There's two patrimonies in play, the creditor and the debtor.
- [29:36]
A
Yeah.
- [29:37]
B
And the idea is they should at least be playing fair, Right?
- [29:42]
A
Yeah.
- [29:43]
B
And they don't.
- [29:45]
A
Okay, so what happens if the someone's incompetent or a wastrel? What do I do if my eldest brother is a wastrel and he's there?
- [29:56]
B
That's something I get toward the end of the book. And I rely heavily on the research work of Liz Mellon, who, when you investigated the question of insanity as a. A legal matter, effectively, as she points out, sane people are supposed to be able to take care of their stuff. Those who don't take care of their stuff must be insane. And it's. It's surprising the degree to which the proofs of insanity revolve around how a person manages property and money and. And some of them quite evidently, because some of these people are taking this property and money and doing very much what they want to do with it without reference to others. And so you get this assertion of a kind of individuality versus the group.
- [30:51]
A
Okay.
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B
There are devices that allow one to. To claim that there's insanity. It might be simply senility, you know.
- [31:01]
A
Yeah.
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B
But that there is insanity to be. To be dealt with and at least it can be taken to court and the arguments made. And of course, it gets interesting in the court cases. I could see why Liz got into the topic so much, because you're getting now a situation where slaves and female members of the household, whose testimony is usually not allowed in a lot of areas of law, are now front and center, you know, as forms of proof to say whether the particular person is, you know, drunk all the time or has fits of rage or, you know, how long they've known the person. And still then there are arguments that could be made by the other side. Well, okay, so one day he went raving mad. It doesn't mean he was insane the next day. Yeah.
- [31:48]
A
Okay. This just feels like a lot of paper.
- [31:54]
B
And that's how you build an archive in Florence with a lot of paper.
- [31:59]
A
A lot of paper. And also it gives me this image of Florence as, you know, just a city of families, a city of patricians.
- [32:10]
B
Well, certainly on the upper end, it plays that way. Yes. There are these certain families and, you know, that's where there are later books that go through genealogies, these families and their coats of arms, some of those very important thing, even some 19th century people, to put these things together, even as the society that made them was going away. And you're getting A national kingdom in Italy, and, you know, changing that there. It's. It is important to realize how much of what goes on, including there are very profound statements about the control of one person over property. And yet, in fact, all property is seemingly bespoken, multiple levels, by family members, by those who aren't family members, you know, and, and nothing transacts alone. And if it does, then we get the situation. But maybe this is insanity, you know, this is not, not what others are doing.
- [33:19]
A
Right. Then that's just not how it's done. So the practices you describe in this book, they don't make it to modernity, right? For the most part. Yeah.
- [33:35]
B
I know. The problem is, again, that one limitation of going at these things from the point of view of law, you tend to get into legal cases and conflicts and they give you this. You can get this sense that everyone's in conflict all the damn. And of course, there are situations. It never makes it to law. It didn't have to. I think, again, the paradigmatic case, the inheritance of a son from father doesn't have to get there. The arguments that will arise there are the questions of, okay, dad had creditors, they have to be paid off. And you have to establish the facts of these things and establish that there's enough property there to pay off those debts. And the other side of the deal are people who owe dad money. So you're going to shake them down and get the. Get the property back. Yeah, there's a lot of conflict in Florence that generates all that paper. But there's also those moments and things that go on and they, because they don't come out in law, then it becomes it. You know, it's one of the reasons, you know, Bartlis makes those statements about family substance or statements that effect. So does contemporary Alberico d', Alrochate, who's a jurist who very, very pointedly looked at statutes and way statutes were treating things in relation to the common law. Later, lawyers rarely have to refer to it. It's known. That's the way it happens. You know, sometimes you find it in one or two, you know, the page of someone. It may get raised in a case, but it's like, okay, Bartless laid it down. That's really kind of the way it is. Yeah.
- [35:09]
A
I mean, one of the very interesting parts of using law as a source is that this paradigm and how often you are going to see it when you're not going to see it, is that because it's not. Nobody cares anymore because it's so overwhelmingly Common that we don't need to.
- [35:22]
B
It doesn't. Doesn't need to be mentioned in some states. Yeah, it's the same issue in a way. One of the things I bring up in a later chapter of the book is, is the inventory, which is an important device at point of inheritance because you can limit your liability to what's on the inventory. And the inventory, they're fascinating devices in some situations because clearly they went through the house room by room. And so you can see, well, this is in this room with this other thing. And, you know, you find out how many pictures, for instance, were in the household, you know, and it gives you another sense of how much, say, art permeates expression and meaning in a place like Florence. But on the other hand, there are also pieces of, you know, property that kind of don't make the list. And some of those, I think, fall in that category. Well, of course, you don't have to talk about that. Yeah, rarely. Well, not so rarely, but sometimes you don't see, for instance, anything said about clothing yet. It's a. It's a. It's a device that is. It's a holder of value. It's traded and sold. There's an entire guild of, you know, used clothing merchants in a place like Florence, but they're not always mentioned on the inventory. You know, I guess, you know, maybe in the same way, you know, nowadays people will make inventories of property and they may not sit there and say, you know, okay, well, he had two suits and three ties. And, you know, supposed to say that's just going to go to gold, Goodwill or something. Anyway, we don't care. I found that It's, It's. I haven't, you know, and I can't say I've systematically gone through bunches of inventories, but I have looked at a number of them. I find it interesting. Almost never do you see anyone mention cash.
- [37:28]
A
Yeah, you think that would be a.
- [37:31]
B
Thing that you think, but you barely see it. I mean, if it's a share in the Monte, where there's money there, and that's dealing with public finance, you know. Yeah. Then they come in and say, we just found out he's got a 50 florin share in this fund and 25 and another fund and. Yeah, that's important, but just a couple of florins lying around, you know, you don't seem to get, you know, now look at it. Of course, making inventory that can be pocketed pretty quick. Yeah.
- [38:01]
A
Okay.
- [38:03]
B
Whereas. Whereas then you're reading an inventory where they're talking about, you know, oh, he's got three knives and, and they'll give the condition of things like household implements to say, you know, has three spoons, two or three stay in sad condition. You know, you think, okay, fine, and they just list that so they don't say, oh, you know, this beat up spoon is worth, you know, a dinar or something like, they just list the item.
- [38:31]
A
Wow, that's a lot of material to go through. That's, this is fascinating. I am fascinated by this.
- [38:37]
B
Oh, those, those are incredible. And again, Florence had an entire magistracy set up at the end of the 14th century to protect. And here's one back to a question asked earlier about what's done by government to protect these patrimonies. This is probably the biggest. Florence provides an oversight agency to look over guardians managing the property of miners. And those records are replete with inventories because that group's demanding right away the guardian has to give us an inventory. And you can see as the guardian at a later point might have to come in and say, we need to sell some of this because any money to buy food or wood and things for, you know, and they'll get an agreement and they'll note that down. Yeah. So the inventory will sit, followed by blank sheets, you know, to make notation of those kinds of things. And that, that outfit lasts for centuries. I mean, so there's a lot of paper there again comes into play when a father dies. Death of the mother does not, you know, to us that's, you know, that's part of being orphaned. If you lose a parent in, in Florence, guardianship falls when the father dies, then the children are, are sui yoris because there's no patra potestos over them anymore. But they're not old enough. Okay. In Florence, the age of majority to enable them is 18, which is a variation from the Roman law standard 25.
- [40:18]
A
And then, and in that moment, that's a real moment of kind of could be chaotic, could be a moment for fraud, could be, I mean that, that could be a very, all sorts of.
- [40:30]
B
It, you know, and the burdens on a guardian are rather large. There's all sorts of law to protect these, these miners from being exploited by their guardians. And the guardians are supposed to give accounting of all of this sort of stuff. And they are, they are making their own property liable, you know, should that be the case. And so not surprisingly, numbers of people even nominated as guardians in, in the will of someone will go to that Florentine group or to A notary, at least, and say, I'm out, take me off the rolls. I'm not doing this, you know. And so the. The pupili in Florence and either have to find someone to step in or kind of directly do it themselves in. The interesting figure here again is in fact, the mother. There is a great preference, though. Initially, in Roman law, guardianship is all about agnation and all about connections through males. And women couldn't be guardians, mothers couldn't be guardians of their own children. Between the Church and the revision of law in later years, they kind of tend to look to the wife right away to be, you know, relying on, you know, they'll talk about maternal love, relying on. On the connection there, and also relying on the fact that the mother cannot inherit from her children. So she doesn't. She doesn't have an iron in the fire. Unlike, say, an uncle or someone like that. Well, if they die, a couple goes to uncle, you know, what are you going to do with that situation? She's not the only thing they have to worry about. And they'll disqualify a woman as guardian if she remarries, because then she's thrown in her lot with another family, another man, you know, even if she takes young children from her first husband with her into the house of her second husband.
- [42:33]
A
Yeah. Wow. Very complex. You know, this is. This tells us so much. This is such a great addition to our understanding of how families work, which is, you know, this book about the law that, in fact is. Is really a wonderful piece about the family as well.
- [42:49]
B
Yeah, well, they work. And sometimes they don't.
- [42:51]
A
They don't. All right. I have taken up so much of your time already and I'm so grateful. So I just have one last question. Very easy one. Are you working on anything right now?
- [43:04]
B
Not on a large scale. Like I said, I've got a piece of work done via papers marking the 600th anniversary of the construction of the Innocenti. So I've got one, you know, back to the issues of illegitimacy and. And, well, and orphans and all of that. The Innocenti is a very interesting item, actually. You know, and then that case I mentioned about the Borme and Potsy and I've got a few other things. I kind of sit in the arc, in the realm of essay size things for a while anyway.
- [43:45]
A
Sounds really nice. Yeah, that and, you know, familial duties of your own.
- [43:50]
B
Yeah, a few. As I told you earlier, I got a bunch of grandchildren come raining down on us recently, so.
- [43:58]
A
Yeah, that is. That's a delightful way to think about the family as well, not just in this historical thing.
- [44:03]
B
Yeah. Gives you that sense of things. Yeah.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me. And I really. I have really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the book. I learned a great deal, and I've enjoyed our talk. So thanks very much.
- [44:17]
B
Thank you. I've enjoyed it very much, too, Sam.