nlya few Danish testaments from the Middle Ages have survived until today, but how should we interpret this state of affairs: is it evidence of absence or absence of evidence? In Danish historical scholarship the former interpretation has usually been preferred, but the present article argues that the testament was a good deal more popular in medieval Denmark than the extant number suggests, and that it continued to be popular throughout the Middle Ages. The apparent dearth of extant testaments must in some part be due to a massive loss of medieval documents in general after the Middle Ages, but it seems that testaments could lose their importance once the legacies had been distributed. Many testaments may simply have been discarded after use. Danish medieval law did not favor the use of testaments, and at the beginning they were primarily used by the very top of the social elite, women as well as men. Women did not otherwise have a legal persona of their own, but they could issue testaments in their own name. In this respect, they were equal to men. The testament continued to be popular in the top tier of society, but this is to some extent inherent in the type of document. Eventually, also the landed gentry and wealthy citizens made use of it, while for the poor it was an instrument that only made sense if they were the beneficiaries of other people’s testaments. It seems that testatrices were more likely than testators to remember their chambermaids and other members of the household in the wider sense. Women of the social elite made use of the testament to circumvent the legal disadvantages of women and it did allow some women to achieve a higher degree of control over their worldly belongings. O anders leegaard knudsen 149 Abstract
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