Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Alex Davis
320 Pages | 11 Illustrations
Oxford, 2020:02 9780198851424 £60.00 (\9,960)
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Imagining Premodern Inheritance
Part I. Fictions of the Will
1: 'A Very Perfect Forme of a Will': The Fictional
Testament
2: Out of Bounds: Testamentary Fiction From The Tale
of Gamelyn to As You Like It
Part II. Natural Philosophy
3: Petrified Unrest: Succession and Descent in
Lancastrian Verse
4: The Home-Bred Enemy: Inheritance and Constancy
in Tudor and Stuart Writing
Part III. World Histories
5: Heavenly Inheritances
6: The System of the World: Inheritance, Money,
Modernity
Epilogue
Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son
who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the
artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a
medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a
seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies
upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate
Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin
bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve.
This book explores how inheritance was imagined between
the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing
composed during this period was the product of what the
historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in
which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social
reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of
status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender
relations were projected from the present into the future. In
poetry, prose, and drama—in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in
plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and
The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works—we
encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary
imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the
fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between
the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining
Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue
that an exploration of the ways in which premodern
inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep
structures of power that modernity wants to forget