Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy.

Thomas Kuehn's new book blends broad learning with restless epistemological questioning into a challenge to prevailing conventions of Italian Renaissance social history. The title and subtitle of this collection of essays, most previously published but now revised, convey the conceptual geography along which Kuehn ranges. But of all those words the "toward" especially captures the essence of the book. For its chiefinterest lies in Kuehn's application of impressive legal-history erudition, wide and thoughtful reading, and thorough mining of notarial and other records in the Florentine archives to musings over some profound conceptual and methodological issues in the context of social interaction among Florentines, mainly in the Quattrocento. His formally dominant concern involves the tension between the static normativity of the Italian legal history tradition and the situational open-endedness of the "extended case method" that Kuehn has imported from legal anthropology. Kuehn announces in the introduction his intention to steer a course between them but be responsive to each. Whether he succeeds in doing so is one of the most interesting issues in the book. But on many other counts as well the reader follows him along a thoughtful itinerary between contrasting impulses as he prescribes and strives to apply a social-history method that, on the one hand, privileges the legal parameters to which, he insists, Florentines were acutely attentive in pursuing their social objectives, and, on the other, "offers a poststructural space for the play of ambiguities" (6).

"Ambiguity," along with "complexity," recurs so frequently as to constitute the book's leitmotiv, notably in Kuehn's comments on scholarship he judges insufficiently attentive to them. His chapters characteristically begin with a rehearsal of writing by other scholars on the subject under investigation, the deficiencies of which then trigger his alternative approach. The deficiencies usually boil down to simplification. Thus Kuehn sees F. W. Kent's work on Florentine kinship as minimizing "the degree to which kinship was fraught with ambiguities" (7). Likewise, he finds that in their studies of wills Samuel Cohn and Steven Epstein "operate on the naive presumption that a will by its nature was designed to withstand challenge and did" (15). Regarding the legalsocial-emotional tangle to which Gene Bruckner dedicated his book Giovanni and Lusanna, Kuehn observes that "only by reading such complex source texts against a wide array of other texts that afford insight into normative and ideological structures and a variety of social practices can we begin to have confidence in our reading of history" (15). He contrasts his own guiding premise with the "neat analyses" of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, in which "[t]here are no loose ends...; everything has its place in structure, a function to fulfill and a meaning to express. The workings of law, on the other hand, reveal jarring notes of disharmony, incoherence, and even dysfunction" (6). For Kuehn, it is law which, far from reducing the social environment to an orderly system, most fully reveals its complexity: "[L]aw comes off not as a level terrain with clearly demarcated features but as an indistinct landscape whose shadowy surface hides the quicksand of pervasive ambiguities" (9).

He is apodeictic about the indispensability of this open-ended perspective on the law for deciphering the complex ambiguities of Florentine society. "The historian must realize that the dynamics and the norms of the social structure of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italy were most often, if not always worked out within recognized legal mechanisms and encoded in the legal language of the surviving texts. The full, multidimensional meaning of such legal acts is not available to the historian without a knowledge of the law." However, this legal expertise, though necessary, is by itself insufficient for dealing with the documentation of Florentine social experience. "Peculiar features of the law ... will continue to elude historians who operate without a coherent theory of textuality and without adequate tools for the complete deconstruction of the texts" (211). The essential equipment for navigating through the complexity and ambiguity of Italian social history in the Renaissance is thus sophisticated grounding in legality and textuality, themselves complex and ambiguous. His deployment of this elaborate theoretical orientation is displayed in the studies that make up the volume.

They fall into three main areas, identified by the substantives in the title and prised open--deconstructed--under Kuehn's analysis. Two strands bind them together. One is the play of lawyerly maneuver, especially in the form of consilia, professional opinions interpreting civil and statute law on behalf of litigants or to inform judges. Discussing consilia produced for disputes over real estate, inheritance claims, the rights of daughters and/or married women, the status of bastards in family reckoning, and the relationship of fathers and sons, Kuehn abundantly displays the plasticity and polysemy that characterized lawyers' interventions in contested matters of social status and interaction. The other strand is property. On Kuehn's showing, Florentines revealed their cultural values and social concerns most vividly when dealing with one another in matters regarding money and money's worth. Neighbors, kinsmen, parents and children, siblings, affines, spouses, fellow-citizens: all expressed, refined, or altered the terms of their relationships in the course of and in response to economic interactions. These highly fraught encounters constituted the terrain on which lawyers crafted contending views not only of property claims but of the nature of the relationships on which the claims were made and variously judged.

Kuehn's treatment of these cases, exploring all sides from a variety of social and legal perspectives, is usefully discomfiting, forcing the reader to confront the elisions, occlusions, and glossingsover that underlie scholars' generalizations and interpretations regarding Florentine (or other) social structures and practices. For example, discussing patria potestas, usually taken as a functioning social norm, Kuehn dwells on its varied and uncertain application in practice. On the one hand, in chapter 8 he marshalls evidence that fathers did not, as other authorities have argued, relinquish their potestas to their daughters' husbands but, rather, retained it, thus giving themselves and their daughters an enduring economic and psychological stake in each other. On the other hand, the discussion in chapter 4 of the bitter anger of Remigio Lanfredini over his father's failure to protect family honor--to discharge the putative responsibilities of paterfamilias--narrates the breakdown of a father's moral authority over his son, revealing a "competitive tension" in father-son relations that was "endemic [in] nature" (139). Kuehn presents these matters as instances of "the multiform dynamic of Renaissance family life," in which flexible principles of family ideology could respond in an endless variety of ways to external forces.

The three chapters addressing the status of women exhibit both the advantages and the problems inherent in Kuehn's approach. In addition to the relationship of married daughters to their fathers already mentioned, they explore the workings of the Florentine institution of the mundualdus, the male agent required to represent women in the courts, and the implications, in statute law and social practice, of the exclusio propter dotem, the principle that the conveyance of her dowry disqualified a married woman from further claims on her father's estate. In each of these studies the substantive issue is located in the complex intersection of legal theory, social regulation, and private interest. Kuehn's historiographically dialogic, theoretically informed, and richly documented treatments of the manifold contingencies in play create a rich ideological, political, and familial context for considering issues of gender in Florence. Historians interested in those issues are in his debt for his panoramic confrontation of their dimensions. But they also may not know how to apply what they have learned. For Kuehn's insistent, unblinking confrontation of the contingent--in texts and in the law, and in the encounter among political structures, family interest, and lawyerly ingenuity--results in a kaleidoscopic variety of social and legal behavior devoid of pattern or coherence except that of endless indeterminacy. The effect is to undermine Kuehn's insistence on the shaping effect of "recognized legal mechanisms" upon the "dynamics and norms of the social structure."

Indeed, the very plasticity of the law that Kuehn emphasizes, its amenability to divergently tendentious readings by lawyers in support of their clients' widely disparate stakes, is hard to square with his insistence that Florentines adapted their interests to legal parameters. On the evidence of Kuehn's exhaustive discussions of concrete cases, the reverse seems truer: what Florentines wanted, lawyers contrived to justify legally. Rather than law channeling private interest, private interest emerges in Kuehn's accounts as driving law into its protean representations at the hands of skilled advocates. In the end, it appears that "the full multidimensional meaning" of social acts is more likely to emerge not in explorations of the "quicksand of pervasive ambiguities" along which "litigants and jurists stumbled" in their legal dealings, but instead in efforts to reconstruct Florentines' hopes and desires before their recourse to legal counsel--in those instances where such recourse proved necessary.

"Hopes and desires," however, add up to intentions, a matter that Kuehn treats, following Dominick LaCapra, with considered skepticism (159; 325, n. 16). This skepticism fits well with Kuehn's unflinching attention to ambiguity and complexity. Yet ironically, one of most satisfying studies in the volume succeeds precisely because, despite thoughtfully presented disclaimers, Kuehn can't help discerning authorial intention, to persuasive effect. In a searching, contextually rich leading of Leon Battista Alberti's Della Famiglia, he argues cogently that Alberti's own illegitimacy led to his making the work at least in part "a directive on the treatment of illegitimate children" (171) and influenced Alberti's overall emphasis on the individual patriline, in contrast with the broader lineage. In this chapter, unlike some of the others, Kuehn's cautious acknowledgment that authorial intent "may be ambivalent and uncertain, and the text can and does carry other meanings for its readers" (159) does not prevent him from offering a firm, solidly documented, persuasively argued reading of one of the master texts of Renaissance society.

Kuehn's writing is of exceptional interest in the current historiographic climate. Its articulately troubled epistemological musing, its unflinching probing of historical scholarship and theoretical literature, its brave effort to blend the arcana of the law and the endless diversity of social circumstance and purpose into a distinctive approach to Renaissance society all add up to an intellectually bracing enterprise. His steady insistence on ambiguity and complexity, not only in social action but in the legal practice that, he argues, gave it structure, results in an open-endedness, a resistance not only to closure but even conclusion, that will make some readers yearn for a bit more "neatness," more "confidence in our reading of history," even more "naivete" in discerning patterns and purposes in social behavior. But in these studies those readers will encounter a thoughtful, challenging reminder of the torpedoes that bolder interpreters damn in their reconstructions of Renaissance society. MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY