ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the economic and physical maintenance of the widow, and how these intersected. Widows are highly visible, more so than any other group of women in the charter evidence. The sample under examination consists of charter material from all parts of southern Italy. There are considerable regional differenees in widows’ lives here, and nuances of class and relative wealth. Economic welfare might depend on the maintenance of widowed status for a woman in a way that it certainly did not for a man. Widowhood itself was a gendered status - the charter evidence, that is, written documents recording property transactions, is far more explicit about widows than widowers, simply because women’s marital state was recorded as a legal condition. A common feature of historiography about widows is the pressure that they might come under from family members and outsiders over the future of the property that they held.
