women as issuers of testaments in medieval denmark neficiaries, the document itself may have seemed redundant and was hence discarded. Fortunately, we sometimes can read about no longer extant testaments in the documents we do possess. In fact, sometimes we know only the existence of executors acting on behalf of some deceased person, but where there are exsecutores testamenti there was also once a testamentum. It thus seems that several factors contributed to a poor survival rate for the testament in medieval Denmark: the constant division of lay estates and their archives led to a huge loss of all kinds of documentation of rightful possession; the confiscation and closing of ecclesiastical institutions in the wake of the Reformation led to the destruction of most of their archives, many of which vanishing without a trace; and finally, as the testament was not as useful as other means of documentation of rightful possession, many medieval testaments may simply have been discarded once the executors had fulfilled their task. Even so, despite the dark figure of once existing but now lost testaments, the number of testaments from medieval Denmark was much, much lower than in western and southern Europe. The testament simply was not as popular in Denmark as elsewhere. As argued by legal historian Professor Helle Vogt, Danish medieval law preferred dispositiones inter vivos to dispositiones mortis causa. The law was prejudiced against the testament, and this must have been a limitation on its use. Donations of landed property to the Church – or to anyone else, presumably – should be made in the donor’s own lifetime.8 When the donation was landed property, this involved a procedure at a public assembly known as a ‘thing’ in Danish, or a placituminLatin.9 This custom placed women at a disadvantage, however, as they had no legal persona of their own at this public assembly. Women could own property, movables as well as immovables; they could inherit it, manage it, and dispose of it; but at the public assembly, they could not perform the procedure needed for the transfer of ownership or rightful possession of lands. 8 Vogt 2017. 9 In addition to Vogt 2017, see Knudsen 2011. 152
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