What to do when an inheritance is a liability rather than an asset? Loaded down with debts and obligations, a legator's testamentary gift could end up costing his heirs more than it was worth. Some Renaissance Florentines looked these gift horses in the mouth and firmly shook their heads by means of acts of repudiation that directed the legacy to another member of the family. Thomas Kuehn here examines these Florentine repudiations in a work that follows on his earlier studies of emancipation and illegitimacy. Like those earlier studies, this deeply researched and deceptively slim book makes the case for more dynamic views of family relations and the law by showing how law was one of the flexible tools that Florentines manipulated creatively in order to advance individual and familial interests. Repudiations became a critical strategic tool for families and individuals in a city that regularly experienced extreme demographic, political, economic swings.

The key source is the registry of repudiations in the Florentine state archives: twenty-seven volumes with 11,317 repudiations for period from 1365 to 1534. Kuehn reads these in relation to statutes, legal texts, and consilia, charts them in twelve statistical tables that track incidence, family relations, gender, location, households, and timing, and offers examples of texts in six short appendices.

Kuehn opens with the background in Roman law and the modifications of late medieval and Renaissance legal scholars who aimed to mediate the needs of communes and families. Repudiations were regularly decried as the abandonment of duty, the defrauding of creditors, and the denial of family. Some general forms emerged nonetheless, with considerable local variation. Florentine laws were tighter than those in many nearby communes, but its citizens were subversively creative, and Kuehn plots four stages in the negotiation of law and practice through the period. From 1365 to 1383 there were few repudiations recorded, the format was not standardized, and gaps interrupted the records. From the mid 1380s to the late 1470s, stable and uniform patterns for registration developed. Repudiations were used widely, particularly for handling rural properties and estates divided into partial shares. From 1476 to 1500, they increased in number and expanded horizontally beyond intergenerational transfers (formerly 80% of the total) to include legacies from brothers, cousins, and uncles. Women figured less often, and the activity moved from rural properties into the city. From 1500 to 1534 the number of repudiations dropped as war and political upheavals opened up gaps in the register. Horizontal repudiations became even more marked, demonstrating that transfers of wealth were becoming more important as families aimed to consolidate and preserve familial holdings.

Using the 1427 and 1480 catasti to co-relate repudiations with household wealth confirms that they were used most by families whose fortunes were on the decline. While laws required that inheritances must be accepted or rejected in toto, Florentines found ways to divide inheritances in such a way that they could accept some parts and repudiate others. And while individuals figure as the actors, the strategies mark collaborative efforts to keep property in extended families while avoiding some legal liabilities. By the sixteenth century, fideicommissary clauses were expanding as a tool that allowed a person to be linked to the patrimony of the family without being the heir to the debts and obligations of an individual testator. Using these clauses together with repudiation helped Florentine families effect a form of primogeniture at a time when learned law still favored equitable distribution of property among all legitimate heirs. Repudiation and fideicommissa enabled families to put property and heirs out of the reach of creditors. It is possible that this disadvantaging of lenders made Florence's economic performance lag behind that of other Italian cities by the later fifteenth century, though this would make Florence's later sixteenth century prosperity harder to explain.

This immensely learned and densely argued book confirms Kuehn's mastery of the Florentine legal sources on family life. He demonstrates persuasively that the dynamics of inheritance, including repudiation, do not support some opposition between individuals and their family and kin-groups as historians used to think. Repudiations and fideicommissa took place within families and kin groups, not against them, and became the means by which these groups secured their survival. They were legal institutions, but legal institutions are tools of expression rather than fixed realities. What they express are social, moral, and emotional attachments and varied interests, or as Kuehn so aptly puts it, the rigidity and yet plasticity of law in relation to daily life. This study joins Kuehn's earlier works in bringing that relation of law and life to the forefront of renaissance social historiography.