Dissertation Information for Cynthia JohnsonNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Marrying and dying in medieval Occitania: A case-study approach to dowries, disputes, and devolution in twelfth-century southern France Abstract: This thesis uses a new, contextual approach to illuminate medieval kinship by analyzing transfers of familial property in ways that incorporate concerns of timing, practice, and agency. Three complementary sets of data were used: first, exhaustive collections of marriage "contracts," testaments, and intra-familial disputes; second, illustrative documents such as sales or donations; and third, in-depth case studies. Three premises guided the research. First, since the standard model of the medieval family was based on the study of the aristocracy, this thesis focuses on the experiences of the rest of the documented population. Second, this method focuses on practices, rather than on prescriptions or ideals, and reveals that medieval Occitanians enjoyed a significant amount of agency to choose among several ways of dealing their property and their kin. Women also possessed a greater degree of agency than has been allowed for in traditional models of family. This project considers the intra-familial disputes that arose as part of a process in which kinship was activated (or not) in practice by invoking norms about kinship, which people used as cultural resources to pursue their own interests. Finally, this dissertation focuses on "devolution"---a term designating the long-term process of transmitting property among generations at different junctures. Considerable attention has been paid to the moment in the life-cycle of a family when events occurred and to its composition at that time, since these factors often determined practices. |
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