This interesting study of widows in French society by Janine M. Lanza stands on a platform staked out in the 1980s by historians of early modern France who called for methodological change to interpret the uses of authority in society and state. By locating legal authority not in hierarchical royal legislation (black letter law) wielding rules top-down on society, but in a more complex juridical venue “negotiated” in day-to-day law practice (law on the ground) in prize-winning works, they showed how accommodations were made in various contexts: the decision on imposture (Natalie Zemon Davis, the doyenne of these revamped studies, The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983); legal contracts guarding goods (Martha Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 1986); the interaction of case law and legislation to reform marital matters (Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State,” French Historical Studies, 1986, “Social Sites,” American Historical Review, 1997, and “The Jurisprudence of the Arrets,” Law and History Review, 2003). Consonant with Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical format—that power does not descend top-down but is negotiated with rules commonly imbibed (the habitus)—they demonstrated not the “rigidity” of the law and the legal system, as Lanza mistakenly asserts (11, 37), but its malleability, whereby women (faced with rules made by men) ran the entire gamut: accepting and rejecting, amending and breaking restrictions while creating safety nets to cushion the risks. In this malleable legal trajectory laid out, the widows studied by Lanza are situated with like results: a variety of accommodations.

We are indebted to Lanza, who firmly subscribes to Bourdieu's negotiated outcomes (21–23) and thus ferrets out numerous ways that working women, who were associated with guilds and managed family economies, engaged in thrusts and parries (from around the 1680s through the 1700s). On one hand, she shows determined widows keeping shops afloat, along with ties to guild life run by the men who made difficult rules they lived with, or flouted. On the other hand, she recounts, by necessity, a rather ambiguous story, if not one of shrinking aspirations. For the curriers (leather dressers), new guild rules (1700s) made it difficult for wives to participate, and once widowed, they were not likely to become mistresses (heads) of the shop (as in other trades). Among the goldsmiths, guild rules (from the 1680s) refused widows their own “hallmarks” (formerly given at the deaths of husbands), forcing a shop mistress to partner with a master goldsmith whose mark stamped her goods. In guild membership discrepancies persisted. Among restaurant owners, widows paid the same guild taxes and dues, yet did not hold full membership; their property rights at risk (1770s), they had to petition for relief. Even so, widows—heads of families—pursued strategies to stay in trades despite “limitations,” for example, the inability to vote in guilds or hold office (hence influence policy) and difficulties recruiting shop labor. Their “transgressive” behavior tells of clever machinations—hiding tools, shifting allegiances, selling a business off—to achieve the best financial outcome. Indeed, widows took whatever piece of the guild pie they could get. Finally, these widows responsible for the family unit also decided whether to remarry, all the while flouting some workplace laws and negating “church” efforts to “neutralize” their gains, or rein them in. As Lanza persuasively argues, many widows, despite serious limitations, were “included in the rhythm of guild life” and “shared in the identity of mastership” (118). This account of accommodation is worth reading.

Less persuasive, even confusing, is the uneven section on “law in France.” Taking quotes from a study of marital separations, Lanza applies them (out of context) to the very different legal issue of marital acts related to family formation (37), thereby setting up incorrect conclusions (if not concocting a straw person). Despite the fact that Bourdieu adopted specific historical findings—the family-state compact of marital laws negotiated (1550s–1650s)—to demonstrate his theoretical stance, she bypasses those findings (and with them the dicta of Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 1998, French ed., 1994; citing “Engendering the State,” 1989, French trans., Politix, 1995). Adrift, she retreats to a hierarchical model of power in a study made long ago that credited the first marital edict of 1557 to a king presumably angry because the pope was slow to annul a clandestine marriage between royals (Paul Ourliac and J. de Malafosse, Histoire du droit prive, 1961). Yet that the edict, as we now know, was just one part of a reform project on marital law begun several generations earlier by distinguished jurists who broke with judicial secrecy, printed early case-law decisions (notable arrets) against clandestine unions (1520s into the 1550s), and therewith pressured kings (through mounting case law) to take legislative action—the edict of 1557—and defend it against the Council of Trent. That caveat noted, on the other steady front of this study, historians will savor the fresh look that Lanza brings to the complex lives of widows (heads of families) who worked in shops, parried with guilds, skirted laws, ignored church injunctions, and managed to stay on.