Imagining inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare

This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a ‘society of heirs’, in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama—in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser’s Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works—we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The prominence of inheritance within this society cuts across conventional period distinctions. This book offers a literary history within which medieval and Renaissance writing are seen as a ‘premodern’ whole, set in opposition to the modern world that succeeded it, in which practices of inheritance are delegitimized without being fully abandoned. Imagining Inheritance thus argues that an exploration of the ways in which inheritance was imagined between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries makes legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.