ABSTRACT
The roles of family members, their rights and duties, and how they can demand and claim those rights are structured and organized by law. In medieval and early modern Europe, these laws gave different property rights to men and women, and people knew them and used them for their own purposes. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze the laws on intestate succession, the restitution of dowry to widows, and the attribution of guardians to children based on sentences pronounced by judges in the everyday exercise of their functions rather than on unique or exceptional judiciary cases. In these cases, the intervention of a judge was required due to either the absence of a last will (i.e., intestate succession) or the absence of instructions in a father’s or husband’s last will concerning a child’s guardian or a wife’s dowry. As I will demonstrate in the fi nal paragraph of this chapter, common people were equipped with much knowledge of laws on succession and inheritance.
