From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris

This first book by American scholar Janine Lanza is a welcome addition to the ever-growing number of articles and monographs that aim to ‘mainstream’ women in history, by presenting them as complex individuals affected by a variety of pressures and choices, not merely statistics or a universally oppressed subcategory for analysis. Lanza's research focuses on the women of a particular social category, time and locale—the widows of merchants of eighteenth-century Paris—but the book goes much further in providing an extremely thorough synthesis of previous research on widowhood for the entire early modern period. The book will therefore be quite useful for undergraduates and postgraduates beginning their research, as a sourcebook for a variety of material (both English and French) gathered together in one tidily organised volume. But it is perhaps here that the book attempts to do too much, and ultimately provides less in the area of new research than is suggested by the book's dust-jacket. The reader has to pass through nearly a hundred pages of material on the background of French legal and religious customs regarding widows in general before delving into the ‘meat’ of Lanza's research on the widows of merchants in eighteenth-century Paris. And, despite the breadth of the material provided, the question is never raised whether this particular set of widows can be regarded as representative of social norms in other areas of France, or indeed the rest of Europe. Due to the broadness of the title, the reader is also left wondering who exactly are the widows in this study (clearly women of enough wealth to employ notaries) but it is not until page 199 that we are given numbers to quantify the relativity of wealth in Lanza's chosen group

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