Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800 (Past and Present Publications)
by Jack Goody (Editor), Joan Thirsk (Editor), E. P. Thompson (Editor)
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This pioneering book examines different aspects of the inheritance customs in rural Western Europe in the pre-industrial age: for families and whole societies, the roles of lawyers in reducing them to a common system, and the recurring debate on the merits of various inheritance customs in shaping particular kinds of society. At first sight the study of inheritance customs may appear to be a dull affair, concerned with outdated practices of hair-splitting lawyers; certainly, little academic show more interest has been shown in the subject. Yet inheritance customs are vital means for the reproduction of the social system, by the transmission of property and other rights through the family. Various family structures and social arrangements are linked by different means of inheritance. This book will interest a wide range of historians, students, postgraduates and teachers alike, whether they are concerned with social, economic, demographic or legal history, in the medieval, early modern or modern periods, and whether their interests are directed to England or other countries of Western Europe; it will also be valuable to social anthropologists, sociologists and historians of ideas. A comprehensive glossary of technical terms has been added for the non-specialist. show lessTags
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Jack Goody is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College

E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) is among the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century. He is known for his works The Making of the English Working Class, William Morris, and the Poverty of Theory, among others. Cal Winslow is a Fellow in Environmental History in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director show more of the Mendocino Institute, a more for profit research and educational center. He was trained at Antioch College and Warwick University where he studied under the direction of E.P. Thompson. His most recent book is Labor's Civil War in California. show less
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- Important places
- Europe; Western Europe
- Original language
- English
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