ABSTRACT
Contradictions swirl around the existing scholarship devoted to women, law and property in the European past. Alongside well-known examples of misogyny and discrimination in legal treatises and legislation sits growing evidence of fiercely independent women who proved adept at overcoming legal obstacles. This contrasting evidence is revealing and the key to resolving the resulting paradox is to recognise the distinct perspectives and sources at play. Legislators and jurists, for example, tended to consider women as a type, and were disparaging of their capabilities, regularly bracketing women (especially if they were married) in the same legal category as infants, idiots and lunatics. All across Europe they employed arguments of physical or intellectual inferiority to bar women from office-holding, discount the reliability of their testimony in court, or to demand that they be shielded, and have their interests represented, by fathers, husbands or guardians. Judges, by contrast, dealt with actual women who appeared in their courts, and they tended to be more open to giving weight to female testimony and recognition to women’s rights over property. Modern historians have different priorities again, often thinking in terms of individual rights extended or denied to women. They are quick to detect gender discrimination in laws and property regimes, whether it be the Swedish inheritance rules applying in rural areas that awarded sons twice the shares of daughters or the English common law rules of coverture that gave husbands virtually unfettered control over the property their wives brought to marriage. 1
