L'adoption à Florence à la fin du Moyen Âge

Abstract

Adoption in Late Medieval Florence. As distinct from forms of informal « adoption » - most notably the fostering of foundlings - formal legal adoption based on the Roman civil law and which resulted in the creation of patria potestas was an extremely rare event in late medieval Florence. The main reason seems to have been the Florentine prejudice toward blood or a sense that law could not change the real and natural. Even within the learned ius commune, jurists had clearly limited the capacity of legal adoption to rewrite the « facts » of birth and blood. The statutes of Florence did not mention adopted persons, and very few emerge in Florentine records, in comparison to the numbers of (still blood-related) bastards and their occasional legitimations as heirs.