The organizers of a conference on “Inheritance and Conflict - A Cross-Cultural Approach to Succession in Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean Families” invite submissions of proposals from interested scholars worldwide. We propose to study the subject through time from archaic Greece up the late Middle Ages, taking into account jurisprudence and legal cases in the civil laws of the Greeks, the Romans and the Byzantines, and studying the religious laws of pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims, and we welcome a wide range of submissions, chronologically, geographically, and in terms of methodology.

Please send expressions of interest, along with abstracts (not exceeding 300 words) to Sabine Huebner: sabine.r.huebner@gmail.com; or to Beatrice Caseau: bacaseau@yahoo.fr by May 31, 2012.

Socio-historical scholarship on the family has been flourishing in recent decades also among scholars of the ancient and medieval world. Scholarly attention turned above all to the definition of the ‘family’, families of the social elite, family memories, family networks, the structure and organization of the oikos / domus, and representations of the family. We propose to work on patterns of and conflicts around succession and inheritance in a cross-cultural comparative perspective, a topic which has received surprisingly little attention by historians and anthropologists interested in the family so far, but lies, as we believe, at the heart of all family strategies affecting household composition, intergenerational relations, and the organization of old age care.

The recent two decades have seen a number of studies coming out on wills and inheritance in the classical world, such as the study by Rubinstein on Classical Athens (1993), by Champlin on Roman wills (1991) or the set of papers on property transmission in the Mediterranean medieval world, edited under the direction of Joelle and Beaucamp Gilbert Dagron and published in 1998. However, inheritance and succession strategies among the common population, peasants, laborers and small traders and craftsmen, which indubitable constituted about 95 percent of all ancient and medieval societies, have been almost entirely neglected in scholarship. Kreller’s groundbreaking study (1919) on inheritance and succession in the Greco-Roman Egypt, for example, for which we have probably the richest source of information about the social strata below the elite, was published already almost a century ago, and no one has ever advanced an update or extension of the topic.

Moreover, the interconnection of family and household forms, on the one hand, and succession and inheritance patterns, on the other hand, have not been discussed at all, even though such a diachronic comparative study definitely constitutes a desideratum: By studying inheritance and succession patterns for a society, region or locality, we get a new grasp on family dynamics and learn more about cultural and social expectations ingrained in a society, such as women’s rights and status, organization of family support networks, potential for intergenerational conflict, etc.. When the law provided for equal sharing between children, in what ways and to what effect could parents favor one child over others? What conflicts could arise among siblings? What was the place of girls in the distribution of the patrimony? How could the elderly generation ascertain their role in the family by using their property as a leverage for securing old age support from their heirs? We know of various forms of succession and inheritance patterns for ancient and pre-modern societies laid out in the legislation and often adjusted to and modified in everyday practice. No matter how the succession was organized, however, more or less serious internal conflicts within the family were often the result.

Ancient and medieval societies based legal succession on the degree of family relations but they also introduced some testamentary freedom, which allowed to bequeath goods and properties to institutions or to persons other than relatives. What conflicts could arise when a childless bequeather, for example, chose to adopt a person outside the family as heir (eg testamentary adoption) or decided to leave his assets to an institution, such as a monastery or a wafq?

Considering the role of religion is a particular fascinating aspect when studying inheritance and succession conflicts. Bequests to religious institutions disregarding succession rules based on the degree of kinship often caused issues of inheritance, but sometimes religious leaders by their active involvement in family affairs also helped to resolve family disputes.