© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 JEMH 11,3 Also available online – www.brill.nl/jemh * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Wesleyan Renaissance Seminar and the Conference on Women’s Agency at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. I would also like to thank Margaret Hunt, Miriam Slater, and the anonymous reviewer of the JEMH for their perceptive comments and constructive criticism. DOWRY OR INHERITANCE? KINSHIP, PROPERTY, AND WOMEN’S AGENCY IN LISBON, VENICE, AND FLORENCE (1572)* JUTTA SPERLING Hampshire College ABSTRACT The marital property regimes, inheritance practices, and kinship structures of Renaissance Italy and early modern Portugal were at opposite ends of a spectrum. In Italy, the legit- imacy of marriage was defined as the outcome of dowry exchange governed by exclusio propter dotem, thus conceptually linked to the disinheritance of daughters and wives. In Portugal, where the Roman principle of equal inheritance was never abolished, domes- tic unions qualified as marriages insofar as joint ownership was established. Kinship struc- tures were rigidly agnatic in Italy, but cognatic, even residually matrilineal, in Portugal. An investigation of notarial records from Lisbon, Venice, and Florence shows how women’s capacity for full legal agency as property owners in both societies differed. Female legal agency, however, whether measured by women’s capacity to engage in property trans- actions independently of their marital status (Portugal), or as the manipulation of limited legal resources, even resistance against a system of dispossession (Italy), always unfolded within the context of larger agendas that were beyond women’s control, such as the processes of state formation in medieval Italy and empire-building in Portugal. INTRODUCTION At the turn of the seventeenth century, a heated debate over issues of women’s rights and position in society emerged in the Republic of Venice. Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte were perhaps the most ardent participants in this debate, proclaiming women’s need for a better edu- cation, and, most importantly, access to property and positions of author- ity. Marinella, in particular, made an observation with which I would like to open my discussion of Venetian, Florentine, and Portuguese women’s property rights and legal agency. It is provocative in contradicting most Venetian historians’ rather positive assessment of contemporary women’s property rights and agency. Comparing the situation of Italian women JEMH_11,3_f3_2111_197-238 5/23/07 9:18 AM Page 197