Does Property have a Gender? Household Goods and Conceptions of Law and Justice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Saxony

Abstract

The subject of this essay is the so-called Gerade, a term used in medieval and early modern Saxon law to designate those objects of personal and household use that were classified as the property of women and were inherited only by descendants of the female line. On the basis of a corpus of documents from the city of Leipzig related to succession wills, inventories, records of negotiation and arbitration of conflicts the meanings and usage of the Gerade within the household economy and the broader context of late medieval and early modern urban life have been brought out. An underlying principle of the Gerade was a gendered ordering of objects and proprietary rights, one which the emergence of a modern, uniform civil law no longer held to be compatible with Enlightenment notions of universality, equality and abstract ideals.