Conventional wisdom holds that, over a long period of history, many women and men in the countryside were prevented from marrying because they lacked access to land. This volume offers an up-to-date discussion of the interaction between inheritance practices, marriage and household formation both for those who inherited and those who did not. It asks why and to what extent inheritance patterns and household structures differed between countries and regions in Europe right up to the present day.

Dealing with both impartible and partible inheritance, it examines how retirement practices and choices between ante-mortem or post-mortem property transfers gave rise to a wide range of specific strategies. The chapters cover rural Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, ranging from semi-subsistence and seignorial societies to highly market-oriented economies. They offer case studies drawn from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to Russia.

 

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Rosa CONGOST, University of Girona, Spain

Llorenç FERRER ALÒS, University of Barcelona, Spain

Jane GRAY, National University of Maynooth (NUI), Ireland

Siegfried GRUBER, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany Switzerland

Anne-Lise HEAD-KÒNIG, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Violetta HIONIDOU, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Sofia HOLMLUND, Stockholm University, Sweden

Steven KING, University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Herdis KOLLE, Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education (SIU), Norway

Julie MARFANY, Cambridge University, United Kingdom

Richard PAPING, University of Groningen, Netherlands

Ofelia REY CASTELAO, University of Santiago di Compostela, Spain

Alice VELKOVA, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic