Widows, property, and law in Lithuania and some other countries
EN[...] This article concentrates on the property status of widows as reflected in the legal sources. The primary example is the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth century. The property status of widows in Lithuania is compared first of all with that in Poland and Hungary, and then with that in the Nordic countries. The examples of the legal practice and the normative law valid for the landowning classes in the sixteenth century are used in comparing these countries. Realising the problem of the relation between the normative law and legal practice, and keeping in mind that there were many variations in the legal practice of various countries, this article has no ambition to define the actual situation of widows in any one country. The situation could not only vary considerably from case to case in the legal practice, but could also change with each law passed, and what looked like two different legal models in two countries in one decade could develop into two almost identical systems in another. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the existing variety of models for providing for widows, and to show how Lithuania fits into the more general European picture. [...]. [Extract, p. 99-100]
- Lietuvos statutų (1529, 1566, 1588 m.) šeimos teisė / Vytautas Andriulis. Vilnius : Teisinės informacijos centras, 2003. 191 p.
- Pirmasis Lietuvos Statutas (1529 m.) / Irena Valikonytė, Stanislovas Lazutka, Edvardas Gudavičius. Vilnius : Vaga ; 2001. 381 p.
