ABSTRACT
The Roman law against transferring gifts from a deceased spouse to a new spouse applied only to re-marrying women but the 1560 edict adapted the second law to apply to both men and women. The Edict of Second Marriages thus clearly linked a widow’s conduct with her ability to govern her household and her children. The edict was concerned with inheritance and family property, but its language and focus reveal moral issues, such as the temptation to remarry, which resurface as common themes in sixteenth-century French literature. To marry the widow, a suitor had to woo her and it was precisely the ‘solicitation’ of the widow by potential husbands that worried the legislators of the 1560 edict. The verdict applied the restrictions, as the Romans had done, to widows and widowers with children from a previous marriage who then embarked upon a second or third marriage.
