Property law is increasingly confronted with limits and modifications arising from environmental and social contexts. The objective of this chapter is to highlight how property law can provide answers to environmental challenges, by adapting several of its fundamental concepts to the polymorphism of environmental and social issues. Starting with a study of the theoretical movement of Earth jurisprudence, the chapter suggests that it is possible to consider Nature as a subject of legal interests, allowing it to acquire legal standing. It also suggests that it is necessary to reconceptualise property and its narrative to develop, in both civil and common law, a more limited, relational and functional conception of property. In addition, the polymorphic heritage of property law makes it possible to call upon the civilian concept of patrimony, in its symbolic or technical function, to protect the environment.

This chapter on engagement and authority explores the role of material culture in negotiations of power, in gifting, as regulatory tools, and as modes or tools of empowerment and connection or conversely, dispossession and exclusion. The chapter is inspired and informed by the author’s work on heritage projects in South America.

Humanists and moralists, such as Leon Battista Alberti, treated patrimony as a seamless whole, shared by all those in a household, but above all passed from father to son. Their vision is what Bartolus gave legal shape to. It is also substantiated in the fiscal statements heads of household submitted to the government of Florence to determine civic finances. But in fact in law there were subordinate and overlapping rights; sons could have property of their own, designated peculium in law, from several possible sources, including their own labors in the market economy outside the home. Presumed sharing of assets and liabilities by creditors sometimes vanished into devices that separated ownership, leading to real concerns with fraud. Family account books reveal careful maneuvering and accounting by fathers and sons. Sorting out what belonged to a son or whether a father was liable presented legal difficulties as well.

In late medieval and Renaissance Italian societies, family was conceived as a quasi-corporate entity, continuing across generations. But in law ownership was conceived as an attribute of individuals, and generally of only one person in a household, the paterfamilias. Legal experts worked to accommodate legal notions to the realities of family life, which were close to what anthropologists have come to term an economy of sharing (with multiple and overlapping rights). Law thus came to provide instruments that helped perpetuate families or terminate them. It fell to the paterfamilias to manage property and use legal instruments to do so in order that the patrimony, substantia, could be transmitted to the next generation.

Chapter 6 looks at the long afterlife of apprenticeship, examining women’s claims to become free and the ways in which they met, and did not meet, the demands of City custom. As with indentures, the paperwork of petitions shows marriage undercutting women’s entitlements; a maze of customary rights blocked women from enjoying the freedom unconditionally. At the same time, in practice the City accepted humble petitions, took fees and granted ‘small shops’ to women who could prove their connections to companies. Women’s place in the City was significant and rooted in tradition and daily practice, but contingent.

The chapter opens with a discussion of the methodological challenges involved in the study of a society for which we have very few contemporary literary sources, before exploring the dynamic intersections of wealth and power in archaic Rome with special attention to changes over time, primarily on the basis of archaeological evidence. The discussion considers the noticeable shift in the display of wealth from funerary settings to housing, stimulated by the introduction of the census; limits on the degree of ostentation on the part of rich and powerful members of the archaic Roman community; and protection against the dissipation of patrimony. In the final part, the focus shifts to the lower end of the social spectrum with a reconstruction of the lifestyle of a typical Roman farmer in the archaic period, with particular reference to calorific needs and allotment size.

The conclusion reviews the principle arguments of the book as part of a coda which reflects on how and why the post-revolutionary culture of collecting was redefined in the final decade of the nineteenth century. A combination of new intellectual paradigms, changes in museum funding and the growing weight of the transatlantic market undercut private collectors’ claims to be stewards of French heritage. Yet amidst these changes the conclusion stresses continuities in how the amateur was conceived in tension with the bureaucratic state, and a study of major donations at the close of the nineteenth century- such as that of Eugène Piot- underlines the persistence of aristocratic forms of distinction within the support given to republican institutions. Challenging conventional narratives about the birth of a uniform national heritage, the book concludes by arguing for the resilience of private patrimony outside of state control.

This introduction positions the book in terms of three key concepts for the nineteenth century: collecting; historical consciousness; and the legacies of the French Revolution. In each case it surveys the relevant scholarship and identifies how this project seeks to offer a fresh perspective on how the circulation and recuperation of objects was central in forging new kinds of historical consciousness in the post-revolutionary era. It argues for the enduring endurance of private collectors within the French public sphere, in contrast to the assumptions that their contribution was increasingly marginal. It suggests that the expanding market for antiques was central in allowing new ways of possessing and imagining the past and insists on the need to re-inscribe the role of private donors and collectors within debates about the shaping of a national heritage (le patrimoine). The introduction also justifies the parameters of the project- geographically and chronologically- and briefly sketches the outline of the following chapters.