Survivors and Status: Widowhood and Family in the Early Modern Netherlands

Abstract

This study juxtaposes the theoretical continuity of customary law with the pragmatic realities of daily life, as these pertained to the rights and privileges of widows in the early modern north Netherlands. The database consists of approximately 1, 000 individuals from noble, gentry, and propertied middle-class families. These were tabulated and cross-referenced as part of a computer-assisted study using several hundred archival sources, in cluding prenuptial and marriage contracts, registers offiefs and other possessions, and testaments. The study demonstrates that widows' legal rights, exercised within and outside the family sphere, were the basis of their visible authority and power during the early modern period. ' These individuals have been identified through a number of cross-referenced sources, of which the most useful are RA Utr., Booth, Inventaris Hands chriften, no. 378, which consists of more than twenty handwritten volumes by a seventeenth-century con temporary of many of the families under scrutiny here; and Wittert, 1910-1912. Further, numerous other archival references such as leenregisters (or feudal land registers) in RA Utr., Rechterlijke Arc hieven, nos. 1863 and 1871 provide a listing of fiefs and the families which held them spanning several centuries. Prenuptial and marriage contracts and wills have been reviewed in the archives listed in the bibliography. Every extant document of this sort per taining to these individuals has come under scrutiny as a basis for these conclusions. 2As one lijftochtbrief of 1617 put it: "We make this [document] each of us of our own free will and without the influence of another, out of the greatest affection and matrimonial love which each of this couple holds and bears toward the other" (RA Utr. , Archief Slot Zuylen, no. 114). 3This seems substantiated by RA Utr., Huisarchief Rijnhuyzen, nos. 126-27, unfortunately in private hands and relatively inaccessible.