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Edited Volume: Inheritance, Law and the Family in Roman and Byzantine times

Research Project
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01.09.2012
 - 31.12.2014

In this binational cooperation we study succession and inheritance in ancient and edieval Mediterranean families in a cross-cultural approach through time from archaic Greece up the late Middle Ages, taking into account jurisprudence and legal cases in the civil laws of the Greeks, the Romans and the Byzantines, and studying the religious laws of pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims. Socio-historical scholarship on the family has been flourishing in recent decades also among scholars of the ancient and medieval world. Scholarly attention turned above all to the definition of the 'family', families of the social elite, family memories, family networks, the structure and organization of the oikos / domus, and representations of the family. We propose to work on patterns of and conflicts around succession and inheritance in a cross-cultural comparative perspective, a topic which has received surprisingly little attention by historians and anthropologists interested in the family so far, but lies, as we believe, at the heart of all family strategies affecting household composition, intergenerational relations, and the organization of old age care. The recent two decades have seen a number of studies coming out on wills and inheritance in the classical world, such as the study by Rubinstein on Classical Athens (1993), by Champlin on Roman wills (1991) or the set of papers on property transmission in the Mediterranean medieval world, edited under the direction of Joelle and Beaucamp Gilbert Dagron and published in 1998. However, inheritance and succession strategies among the common population, peasants, laborers and small traders and craftsmen, which indubitable constituted about 95 percent of all ancient and medieval societies, have been almost entirely neglected in scholarship. Kreller's groundbreaking study (1919) on inheritance and succession in the Greco-Roman Egypt, for example, for which we have probably the richest source of information about the social strata below the elite, was published already almost a century ago, and no one has ever advanced an update or extension of the topic. Moreover, the interconnection of family and household forms, on the one hand, and succession and inheritance patterns, on the other hand, have not been discussed at all, even though such a diachronic comparative study definitely constitutes a desideratum: By studying inheritance and succession patterns for a society, region or locality, we get a new grasp on family dynamics and learn more about cultural and social expectations ingrained in a society, such as women's rights and status, organization of family support networks, and potential for intergenerational conflict.

Collaborations & Cooperations

2015 - Participation or Organization of Collaborations on an international level
Béatrice Caseau, Professor of Byzantine History, Paris IV - Sorbonne; Collège de France, Research cooperation

Publications

Huebner, Sabine R. and Caseau, Béatrice (2014) Inheritance, law and religions in the ancient and mediaeval worlds, Monographies / Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance. Paris: ACHCByz (Monographies / Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance).

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Huebner, Sabine R. (2014) ‘‘It is a difficult matter to be wronged by strangers, but to be wronged by kin is worst of all’ : inheritance and conflict in Greco-Roman Egypt’, in Inheritance, law and religions in the ancient and mediaeval worlds. Paris: ACHCByz (Monographies / Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance), p. S. 99–108.

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Huebner, Sabine R. and Caseau, Béatrice (2014) ‘A cross-cultural approach to succession and inheritance in the ancient and mediaeval Mediterranean’, in Inheritance, law and religions in the ancient and mediaeval worlds. Paris: ACHCByz (Monographies / Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance), p. S. 5–8.

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Members (1)

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Sabine Huebner

Principal Investigator