ABSTRACT
Legal history has always been a significant part of historical scholarship, and because so much law revolves around issues such as marriage and inheritance, which have a direct impact on women, women's experience was not excluded from legal history the way it was from many other areas of historical investigation. Studies of women's theoretical legal position in both Germany and elsewhere in the early modern period have noted a slow tendency toward primogeniture and an increasing unwillingness to let even unmarried adult women handle their legal affairs. Many institutional and political historians have become less interested in simply investigating legal theory and prescriptive law codes and have turned instead to looking at how laws were actually implemented and enforced; for this they use official government records produced by courts, councils, and rulers. The legal history of women is no longer simply the story of codes, courts, and treatises, but also of bodies, communities, and consciousness.
