THE POSITION OF WIDOWS IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL STATUTES OF THE KVARNER AND DALMATIAN REGIONS
THE POSITION OF WIDOWS IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL STATUTES OF THE KVARNER AND DALMATIAN REGIONS

Summary/Abstract: In the research, the authors try to determine the legal position of women, widows in the oldest provisions of legal sources dating from the 12th-14th centuries from the Kvarner and Dalmatian legal regions. Referring to the legal position of women who were left without legal and economic protection after the death of their spouse, the authors note that in the earliest legal sources, widows are defined by patterns of desirable behavior, and the issue of the legal position of widows is regularly mentioned in the category of orphans or other socially vulnerable categories. The aforementioned circumstance leads to the conclusion that the peculiarity of the legal position of widows is exhausted exclusively in the need to ensure property-legal protection within the framework of medieval communes. For this reason, the authors will exhaustively analyze the inheritance legal provisions of individual sources, but since the property legal component of a widow's position is significantly defined by her position in marriage and family, the research will also refer to the regulation of marriage law in two legal regions. Since widows, judging by the rules of intestate inheritance, did not enjoy a particularly privileged inheritance-legal position, the authors tried to determine the legal nature of the institution of widow's inheritance in the sources where it is standardized. In contrast to the above, some sources regulating the legal position of widows cite certain peculiarities that indicated a more favorable legal position of widows compared to married women, especially in the field of criminal and procedural law. With the purpose of determining the common origin of the aforementioned regulations in the Justinian and Venetian solutions, these provisions will be the subject of an exhaustive comparative analysis below.

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