summary. the open window fits. Legal wording placed limits on women’s and men’s opportunities for capital accumulation and their opportunities to participate in a credit market. Gender studies researchers have fully understood this point. During the 20th century, scholars investigated ownership and management circumstances for women living in rural areas, but it was not until the past decade that several studies on women in late medieval cities appeared. The present study is a contribution to this area of research. In 2010, Martha C. Howell publishedCommerce before Capitalism in Europe, a study in which the concept of property was further problematized. Here, the importance of real property for the livelihood of people, even for the people in the cities, was emphasized. The commercially engaged burghers needed to create the conditions for the free use of their immovable property, to make it transferable, so transferable that it was regarded as movable property which was not subject to the legal restrictions of immovable property. Howell coined new concepts to describe where on the immovable-movable scale immovables could be positioned. Inherited property could be “partible”, “partially partible” or “impartible”. Impartible was the standard starting position during the Middle Ages. Impartible meant that the inherited property could not be transferred from one line to another, for instance male line to female line. When lineal property could be considered partially partible, some of the property could be transferred to someone other than the property owner’s heirs, for example, the income from the rental of a room could be ascribed to a person from a kin group other than the owner of the property. When lineal property could be said to be partible, it meant that the whole property could be freely (without reservation) transferred from one line to another and actually owned by another family. All transactions of immovables, regardless whether it was lineal property or acquired real property, are examined in the study with reference to where transactions ended up along the partible, partially partible, impartible scale. In all situations, Swedish town law signaled that inherited property could not be transferred fromone family to another and thus not between spouses. In Stockholm, however, this did not prove to be true in practice during the period 1479–1530. 286
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