Privilege, Memory and Perpetuity : Entails and Entailment in Europe, ca. 1300-1800)

Abstract

The texts which this book brings together build on a key theme of the VINCULUM project, envisaged from the outset as one to be developed collaboratively between outside researchers and members of the team: the study of the presence of entailment in the European territorial space between the 14th and 17th/18th centuries. The book is composed of eleven chapters dealing with the subject of entailment in different parts of the continent: France, Italy, the Austrian portion of the Habsburg Empire, Hungary and Spain. Collectively, its contents yield a preliminary map of the perpetual entailment of property and its inheritance as it undoubtedly existed throughout late-medieval and early-modern western Europe, and contribute to situate the subject of entailment historiographically and theoretically — affording a chronologically and geographically far-reaching perspective that is at once case-study-based and comparative.