ABSTRACT
The social and legal structure of medieval and early modern Spain fostered women’s active participation in economic affairs. Before the advent of the mayorazgo in the later Middle Ages, inheritance patterns “were still predominantly cognatic, equal importance being attached to male and female lines, and Visigothic law dictated that all heirs, both male and female, should receive an equal share.”1 These patterns empowered women because they could own and inherit property (with all its privileges and responsibilities) in their own right. This was true across social classes. Allyson Poska found that peasant women in Galicia benefited from a “combination of Castilian law and Galician inheritance custom” to make independent decisions about land and property.2 Heath Dillard found wives of townsmen in the Castilian frontier acting with their husbands to “sell, mortgage, exchange or otherwise dispose of property,” and she points out that this partnership existed all the way up the economic scale, “not excluding the routine inclusion of queens in all the donations and public acts of medieval Castilian monarchs.”3 Helen Nader, examining noblewomen from the powerful Mendoza family, argues that they “managed, bought, and sold family property.”4 The active role of wives increased during widowhood, when women could legally head households, become guardians, and make independent decisions about their property.5
