This study, which is based on a Cambridge dissertation supervised by Nora Berend, takes up a discussion-now more than one-hundred years old-about the actual status of persons called servi, mancipia, or ancillae in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries in Hungary. To put the issue in a wider context, the author first summarizes older and more recent research on the conditions of dependent labor in early medieval Western Europe. As his findings demonstrate, one should be cautious with any unequivocal or general definition of these people's social positions: even historians working with a significantly wider array of sources than those available in Hungary have failed to reach any consensus on the question of whether or not these people could be accurately characterized as slaves, serfs, or any of the other names that have been given to them. Then, in contradiction to the contention that very little research has been devoted to this question in Hungarian historical scholarship (p.1), Sutt gives a thorough and informative survey of the literature from the beginning of the twentieth century to, roughly, the present day (pp.7-18). A crucial subchapter follows on the definition of slavery (pp.18-32). Much of the debate rests on semantics. Most historians have tended, tacitly or otherwise, to equate the notion of slavery with the Antique Roman slave bands or the African plantation slaves of America. Sutt widens the discussion by introducing evidence from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day (or recent) slave-holding societies in Sub-Saharan Africa. As with other similar comparisons between ancient states or contemporary "societies without writing" and medieval Europe, I am not sure that these are as useful as the author believes. (The debate on this question, however, is far too broad for me to cover it in any detail here.
a b s t r a c tWomen's history for Árpád-era Hungary (1000e1301) has generally been restricted to legal issues and the royal court. This study addresses these deficiencies by examining women in the Register of Várad in regard to three areas of investigation: marriage practices and the involvement of the Church, access women had to property and the access women had to authority. Evidence from the register indicates that by the thirteenth century, ecclesiastical ideas regarding marriage were barely making themselves felt. Ideas of consent and even the indissolubility of marriage were at times unimportant. Though priests were occasionally present at marriages, their role was not decisive. Women had three primary means of obtaining property. They could receive gifts or dower on the event of their wedding, and they could receive a portion of the patrimony. This inheritance was termed the quarta filialis as it amounted to no more than one-quarter of the father's property. These gifts came under the control of the woman's husband, and she could not access them until his death. Widowhood combined with guardianship of a minor son could allow women to exert considerable power and, just as elsewhere in Latin Europe, women's access to public and private authority most approximated that of men's as a widow. Not all women, of course, had access to such power. The Register of Várad shows numerous instances of women slaves who were under the complete control of their master.
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