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In the medieval to early modern eras, legal manuals used visual cues to help teach the church laws of consanguinity and affinity as well as concepts of inheritance. Visual aids such as the trees of consanguinity or affinity helped the viewer such as a notary, law student or member of the clergy to do the ‘computation,’ or reckon how closely kin were related to each other by blood or by marriage and by lines of descent or collateral relations. Printed riddles in these early legal manuals were exercises to test how well the reader could calculate whether a marriage should be deemed incest. The riddles moved from legal textbooks into visual culture in the form of paintings and cheap broadside prints. This article examines a riddle painting ‘devoted’ to William Cecil when he was Elizabeth I’s principal secretary, before he became Lord Burghley and explores the painting’s links to the Dutch and Flemish kinship riddles circulating in the Low Countries in manuscript, print and painting. Cecil had a keen interest in genealogies and pedigrees as well as puzzles and ciphers. As a remarried widower with an eldest son from a first marriage and children from his longer second marriage, Cecil lived in a stepfamily typical of the sixteenth century in England and Europe. The visual kinship riddles in England and the Low Countries had a common root but branched into separate traditions. A shared element was the young woman at the centre of the images. To solve the riddle the viewer needed to determine how all the men in the painting were related to her as if she were the ego, or self, at the centre of a consanguinity tree. This article seeks to compare the elements that connect and diverge in the visual kinship riddle traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Low Countries and England.

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France provides the first comprehensive comparison of the printed debates in the 1500s over the superiority or inferiority of woman - the Querelle des femmes - and the dignity and misery of man. Analysing these writings side by side, Lyndan Warner reveals the extent to which Renaissance authors borrowed commonplaces from both traditions as they praised or blamed man or woman and habitually considered opposite and contrary points of view. In the law courts reflections on the virtues and vices of man and woman had a practical application-to win cases-and as Warner demonstrates, Parisian lawyers employed this developing rhetoric in family disputes over inheritance and marriage, and amplified it in the published versions of their pleadings. Tracing these ideas and modes of thinking from the writer's quill to the workshops and boutiques of printers and booksellers, Warner uses probate inventories to follow the books to the households of their potential male and female readers. Warner reveals the shifts in printed discussions of human nature from the 1500s to the early 1600s and shows how booksellers adapted the ways they marketed and sold new genres such as essays and lawyers' pleadings.

This essay explores how families and the artists they commissioned in the 1500s and 1600s visually presented a remarriage to the viewer and what these representations reveal about the place of first wives, second wives, and the children of their respective marriages. The paintings examined here deserve attention because they disclose the ambivalence of remarriage in a way that complements the evidence of legal records and laws, letters and plays, probate inventories, wills, and marriage contracts. In these portraits the loss of a spouse and mother and the commemoration of her care for offspring and years of married life are juxtaposed with the future children and social connections offered by a new wife: they express the remembrance and farewell to a wife and mother as well as the introduction of a new one. (Quotes from original text)

To understand the position of women before the law, historians in the first wave of feminism in the early 1900s examined the legal status and conditions of women in specific European countries such as England, France and Germany, but these overviews were not necessarily focused on the early modern period. 2 By the 1960s through early 1980s, second wave feminist studies - as part of the movement to restore women to history - concentrated on the conditions of women in a particular place and time, mapping out the legal status of women and the restrictions under which they operated. 3 Historians of the law are not immune to the methodological shifts of the discipline and the study of women's legal status has evolved with the rise of social history and its attention to class and race, as well as the later shift to a perspective recognizing the gender differences between male and female experiences of the law.

Like Renaissance dignity and misery-of-man literature, the Querelle des femmes began in the late Middle Ages in manuscript. The Querelle gained momentum when Christine de Pisan queried why she seemed to encounter only malicious women in her reading of texts such as the Roman de la Rose when her acquaintances and women of the French court were modest, chaste and humble. Most scholars have treated the Querelle des femmes separately from the rest of moral philosophy in part because they have scoured the defences of women to look for early sparks of feminism. The terms 'feminism' and 'anti-feminism', although anachronistic, are often applied to the opposing sides of the Querelle des femmes. Ambivalence, mixed models, contradictory examples these are the starting points for understanding the representations of woman in the Querelle des femmes and the ideas about human nature that we find in the debate on the dignity and misery of man.

This chapter focuses more on the opposing voices in the Querelle des femmes such as the arguments emphasising the excellence and dignity of woman or pointing to how she participated in the misery of man. It examines the theme, initially raised of how texts on man and woman and their vices and virtues were packaged and marketed by authors, merchant printers and booksellers. The chapter discusses the idea of the dignity of man in the sixteenth century involved working ceaselessly for virtue to achieve upward mobility or maintain one's place in the social hierarchy. By investigating both dignity and misery, we overcome the tendency of intellectual historians to present the Renaissance as a period of optimism with opportunities for the man of greatness. Many of the commonplaces of the French dignity and misery of man literature parallel and intersect with the debate on the nature of woman.