Imagining Inheritance From Chaucer To Shakespeare

Impossible Bequests Of The Soul; An Outlawed Younger Son Who Rises To Become Justice Of The Kings 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.