Table of Contents
Acknowledgements. Abbreviations.
Part One: Defining Widowhood. 1. Introduction - Sandra Cavallo/Lyndan Warner. 2. Men, women, and widows: some implications of the terminology of widowhood in pre-Conquest England - Julia Crick. 3. Finding widowers: men without women in English towns before 1700 - Margaret Pelling.
Part Two: Models and Paradoxes. 4. The widow's options in medieval southern Italy Patricia Skinner 5. The virtuous widow in Protestant England - Barbara Todd. 6. Widows, widowers and the problem of 'second marriages' in sixteenth-century France - Lyndan Warner. 7. Marrying the experienced widow in early modern England: the male perspective - Elizabeth Foyster.
Part Three: Marital and Family Constraints. 8. Lineage strategies and the control of widows in Renaissance Florence - Isabelle Chabot. 9. Property and widowhood in England 1660-1840 - Amy Louise Erickson. 10. Religious difference and the experience of widowhood in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany - Dagmar Freist.
Part Four: Self-constructions in Legal, Religious and Institutional Narratives. 11. Widowhood and religious expression in early modern Spain: the view from Avila - Jodi Bilinkoff. 12. Widows at law in Tudor and Stuart England - Tim Stretton. 13. Widows, the state and the custody of children in early modern Tuscany - Giulia Calvi. 14. Survival strategies and stories: poor widows and widowers in early industrial England - Pam Sharpe. Suggestions for reading on widowhood. Notes on contibutors. Index.