Casato

'Isabella succeeded to the Spanish throne on the death of her father, Ferdinand VII, when Salic Law was set aside.'

A principle of kinship affiliation that emphasizes the vertical chain of descent from fathers to sons. Also often referred to as agnatic or lignaggio (Italian for lineage). Casato, during the year of 1739 was seen by some to be ‘the most fundamental part of the Italian family’. The contending view; parentado or parentela (kinships drawn through women as well as men) co-existed as well and thus allowed kin to include women; this occurred often when women had been the ‘instrument of an important marriage alliance’. These two principles of affiliation did not ‘represent successive stages in the evolution of kinship’, but rather coexisted as sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting ways to think about the family. Using the practice of casato, a direct transfer takes place of both name, inheritance and rank through the male line. Whereas, when using the practice of parentado the family’s network of influence and power increase by the power of marriage alliances and through the exchange of women and dowries.

Casato and It's Legal Ramifications for Women

Renaissance Florence has persuasively shown how the Florentine family structure presented a strong agnatic bias, which heavily limited women’s rights to property and children, even their social identity and sense of self. Married at an early age, the Florentine woman from the 'propertied classes did not own either her dowry or the rich clothes and jewels which adorned her during the wedding ceremony'. If she became a widow, pressure from her paternal family would likely force her to remarry, and thus lose contact with her children, who legally belonged to their father’s casato, or agnatic family. Renaissance Florence women were 'structurally located between male lineages: they moved in and out of casato where they never permanently belonged'.

Strategic Reasons for Parentado

Kinship ties through the female line were as important as those through the male side. For example, families in provincial Vicenza stressed their horizontal connections with the 'wider kinship group formed through marriage and the female line whenever this kin brought new political alliances, and thus an increase of the power and influence of the family'.

Changes in Gender Roles and Kinship

In the first half of the eighteenth century, Italy could have been perceived as a country where gender roles offered comparatively more freedom to a woman regardless of family ties. In 1680, a law passed by Pope Innocent XI radically changed, and excluded women from intestate succession by overriding Roman law which permitted this. He argued that women’s exclusion from inheritance in favour of the male line was ‘a universal custom, not only of Italy but of all other people who live by the law’. Starting in the age of communes, municipal statutes increasingly limited women’s inheritance rights (fundamentally by excluding daughters from inheritance on the grounds that they received a dowry at marriage) and sought to impose some form of male guardianship over all women, especially in property matters. The rational for the exclusion of daughters from inheritance was called ‘favour agnationis: the preservation of the family, as defined by agnation or the male line’.

Roman law distinguished between agnation (a relation through a male person) and cognation (a relation through either a male or female person). But the concept of agnation, as defined by Roman law, never implied women’s exclusion from inheritance.

See Also

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Agnatic seniority
Kinship
Parentado
Primogeniture
Salic Law

References

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Ferraro, Joanne M. 2002. "Family and Clan in the Renaissance World." In A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance. Ed. Guido Ruggiero. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 173- 187.

Pomata, Gianna. 2002. "Family and Gender." In Early Modern Italy 1550-1796. Ed. John A. Marino. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 69-86.

For Further Reading

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Cohen, Elizabeth S. and Thomas V. Cohen. 2001. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Chojnacki, Stanley. 2000. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ferraro, Joanne M., Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State (Cambridge: Cambrigde University Press, 1993).

Grubb, James S. 1996. Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Haas, Louis. 1998. The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Hughes, Diane O. 1975. "Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa." Past and Present 66: 3-28.

Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. 1985. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kuehn, Thomas. 1991. Law, Family & Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Laslett, Peter, “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Eurpoe Compares.” in Family Forms in Historic Euproe ,ed. R. Wall, J. Robin, and P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

External Links

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnatic_seniority

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentado

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primogeniture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salic_Lawc

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/descent/cognatic/index.html

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