The widow and the notary
Death, gender, and legal culture in the Jewish and Christian communities of medieval Catalonia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12921971 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah Ifft Decker (0000-0002-2607-7845, Rhodes College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 103-120 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-6559 • E-ISSN: 1754-6567 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17546559.2023.2295464 |
| OpenAlex | W4390617501 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 33 |
When men died in medieval Catalonia, their widows went to the notaries. This article traces the ways in which Jewish and Christian women negotiated legal culture in response to their husbands' deaths in Catalan cities between 1250 and 1350. Death required deeply practical responses as well as emotional ones: the administration of the estate of the deceased was often a pressing concern. Both Jewish and Christian women relied on a variety of legal institutions to safeguard their own and (in some cases) their children's financial futures as they entered widowhood. Through a combination of Latin notarial documentation and Hebrew responsa literature, this article compares Jewish and Christian women's legal responses to the deaths of their husbands. Jews navigated Christian legal institutions and sometimes adapted Christian customs. Yet they also maintained distinct practices, and Jewish widows and their families maneuvered between Christian notaries and Jewish rabbinic authorities as they shaped their individual legal responses to the life-changing deaths of their husbands
Archaeology · Documentation · Estate · Hebrew · Judaism · Legal culture · Political science · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Medieval History and Crusades · Medieval Literature and History
Women, family, and ritual in Renaissance Italy
Medieval Jewish widows
Jews in the Notarial Culture
The Measure of Woman
The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry
Affective networks across the divide
Able and available
Hatpasah – Jewish translata documents from medieval Catalonia
Benedictus’ Summer’s Night Dream
Public Activities of Catalan Jewish Women
Between two cities
My precious books and instruments’
A separate people’? Some directions for comparative research on medieval women
Widowhood and poverty in late medieval Florence
Communities of Violence
Imaginary Cartographies
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |