The Written Will: Commanding Property and Posthumous Voice
In Unquiet Women: From the Dusk of the Roman Empire to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, Max Adams assembles a “patchwork of the forgotten lives” of women who defied historical erasure. Among the most potent recurring motifs in this narrative is the written will—a legal testament that transforms from a simple instrument of property disposal into a profound symbol of female agency, self-definition, and enduring influence within patriarchal societies. The wills examined here are not merely dry records of bequests; they are rare, deliberate acts of self-inscription that allow women to project their authority beyond the grave, often in direct opposition to the legal and social norms that sought to silence them.
The Written Will as a Literal Artifact
A written will is, in its literal sense, a legal document by which a person (the testator) dictates the distribution of their possessions, servants or slaves, and land after death. In the contexts Adams explores—tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England and eighteenth-century colonial Peru—such documents were inscribed on parchment or paper, witnessed, and notarized to ensure their binding force. They frequently begin with religious formulas that affirm the testator’s adherence to the dominant faith, followed by lists of bequests that range from the grand (estates, chests of money) to the intimate (a badger-skin gown, a snuff box, a worn skirt). These testaments serve as both pragmatic instruments of control and as final declarations of identity, linking the testator’s soul to the memory of her possessions and dependants.
Where the Written Will Recurs in Unquiet Women
The motif of the written will surfaces most prominently through two women separated by eight centuries and an ocean: Wynflæd, an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, and Ana de la Calle, a free woman of colour in colonial Peru. In Chapter 17 (“Wynflæd’s will”), the reader encounters a detailed tenth-century testament in which Wynflæd bequeaths estates, slaves, gowns, silver cups, and a red tent. She frees some bonded servants while passing others—a seamstress and a weaving mistress—to her daughters, valuing their craftswomanship as inheritable capital. The document is preserved directly in a monastic cartulary, offering an “insight… into the resources and influence that Early Medieval women of influence and wealth might possess, and wield.”
Across the Atlantic in Chapter 44 (“The will of Ana de la Calle”), a similar female will emerges from 1719 Trujillo. Ana, a bread-seller and former slave descendant, dictates her last wishes from a sickbed. She owns a house, cash, a bedstead, a cedar trunk with lock and key, and two enslaved people—a black woman named María Isabel and her infant daughter. Her will legitimises an illegitimate daughter, María de la Cruz, as universal heir, and it carefully distinguishes her professional surname (“de la Calle”—of the street) from the pious one she assigns her child. Additional legal papers reveal a granddaughter’s later suit to recover heirlooms that had passed to an in-law, underscoring how women’s testaments became touchstones in ongoing property disputes.
A third, related documentary form appears in Chapter 14 (“Cáin Adomnáin: the first laws for women”), where the 697 Synod of Birr produced the Lex Innocentium. While not a personal will, this legal code, attributed to Abbot Adamnán at his mother’s insistence, enshrined non-combatant protections for women and introduced fines for sexual violence. It reflects a collective, legislated “will” to carve out a protected space for women’s bodies and reproductive labour.
In each recurrence, the document is not an abstract ideal but a tangible object—a charter, a notarized paper, a codex entry—that Adams uses to anchor women’s historical presence. The written will becomes a material extension of the female voice, surviving precisely because it was recorded and archived outside the dominant oral-masculine traditions of heroic poetry and chronicle.
The Symbolic Meaning: Command, Identity, and Legacy
The written will functions on multiple symbolic levels. Most obviously, it embodies command over property. Wynflæd disposes of multiple estates, livestock, and slaves with the clause “perpetual inheritance to dispose of as she pleases”—a phrase that Adams notes signals freehold land owned independently of any future marriage. Ana’s will asserts sole ownership of a house purchased with her first husband, life interest for a second husband, and a legacy to a daughter born out of wedlock. Both women, as widows, exercise the legal privileges of sole property holders, a status that Adams identifies as an “outstanding feature of the Early Medieval period and beyond,” created by the high male mortality from warfare.
Second, the written will is a vehicle for posthumous identity construction. Wynflæd’s gift of her “double badger-skin gown” (or possibly a sophisticated broken-twill garment) advertises her participation in a luxury textile economy and hints at her possible role as the head of a weaving atelier. Ana’s retention of the surname “de la Calle” and her nickname “Mama Anica” suggest a public, professional persona that defied the erasure of marriage and slavery. By dictating what will be remembered and who will inherit, these women write their own end-of-life narratives, refusing to be defined solely by the male-line genealogies of chroniclers.
Third, the will signifies matrilineal agency. In both testaments, daughters—not sons or husbands—emerge as principal beneficiaries and executors of the female line. Wynflæd’s daughter Æthelflæd receives the estate at Ebbesborne as “perpetual inheritance,” while Ana names María de la Cruz universal heir even after a second, childless marriage. The documents thus materialize a deliberate transfer of female power through objects and land, reinforcing what Adams elsewhere calls “the rights and privileges of widows who became sole owners.”
Finally, the written will symbolizes the limitations of women’s autonomy even as it records their defiance. Wynflæd’s bequests still require the king’s confirmation, and her slaves are inherited as property despite manumissions. Ana’s goods, detailed in a later inventory, include a piece of the True Cross and a small statue of the Virgin—objects that root her identity in colonial Catholic piety, a religion that simultaneously constrained and elevated women of colour. The will thus mirrors the “dual-edged tool” of religious life, granting women a sanctioned public voice while binding them to patriarchal institutions.
How the Meaning of the Written Will Changes Across Time and Place
The written will’s meaning shifts in response to the legal and cultural landscapes it inhabits. In Anglo-Saxon England, a noblewoman’s will was an echo of Germanic legal custom that permitted freewomen to own land and slaves. Wynflæd’s testament is a product of a warrior society where widows’ economic power filled the vacuum left by dead husbands. The document’s religious bequests—gold mancuses to every servant of God, silver cups to the refectory—show how such wills functioned as instruments of Christian charity, purchasing prayers for the testator’s soul and thereby extending her influence into the spiritual realm.
Centuries later in colonial Peru, the will becomes a tool of racial and social self-fashioning. Ana de la Calle, a morena of Lucumí caste, uses her testament to assert free status, legitimate her daughter, and transmit goods that range from a wheat-coloured shawl to a gourd adorned with silver. The inventory of her chattels, fought over by her granddaughter, reveals how women of African descent navigated Spanish legal systems to protect their lineage and consolidate modest wealth. The written will here is no longer the privilege of a noble elite but a strategic document of the urban poor and freed, enabling them to carve out legacies in a rigidly hierarchical colony.
The Cáin Adomnáin, though a law rather than a personal will, marks an earlier shift: a communal decision to write protections for women into enforceable statute. Its mythic framing—Adamnán buried in a stone chest by his mother until “women are freed for me”—depicts legal text as the ultimate outcome of maternal moral authority. The synod’s decree that a woman-killer lose his right hand and left foot makes the written word a guarantor of female bodily integrity.
Connections to Key Characters and Themes
The written will resonates with nearly every theme that structures Unquiet Women. It is a primary instrument of the recovery of women’s history, since these documents often constitute the only first-person voice an ordinary woman has left behind. The material goods listed in the wills—Wynflæd’s buffalo horns, tapestries, and filigree brooch; Ana’s frying pan, mirror, and engraved dais—exemplify women’s agency through material culture. Each item tells a story of domestic production, trade, or patronage that male-centred chronicles ignore.
The motif also links to religious life as a dual-edged tool: wills are infused with Christian formulas, yet they enable women to circumvent ecclesiastical disapproval of female wealth. Wynflæd may have been a “proprietary abbess,” and her bequests of holy veils and headbands to nuns in her circle blur the line between secular and religious identity. Ana’s legacy to the monastery of St Francis and her possession of a relic of the True Cross embed her worldly transactions in a framework of salvation.
The theme of resistance and nonconformity is palpable in Ana’s insistence on her own name and her daughter’s legitimation, a quiet rebellion against the degraded status of illegitimacy and slave ancestry. Meanwhile, the written will as a symbol of intellectual networks and education is visible in the scribal culture that made these documents possible: Wynflæd’s will survives because monks copied it; Ana’s because a notary public recorded it, and a granddaughter’s husband argued over it in court. The will thus sits at the intersection of female intent and male literate authority, a paradox that runs through many women’s lives in the book.
Deepening Study: Questions and Answers
1. How does the written will serve as a counter-narrative to Mary Astell’s complaint that male historians ignore women’s achievements?
The written will forces a historian to acknowledge a woman’s economic power and personal preferences in her own words, bypassing the “gendered act of exclusion” that Astell condemned. While chroniclers might dismiss a Wynflæd as a mere noblewoman, her testament reveals her as a landholder, slave-mistress, and patron of textile workshops. The will’s legal and archival resilience makes it impossible to erase her entirely, providing the very “rigorous work of rescue” that Adams undertakes.
2. In what specific ways do the wills of Wynflæd and Ana de la Calle illustrate the significance of widows’ legal status?
Both women had outlived at least one husband, granting them control of marital property that would otherwise have been managed by a male guardian. Wynflæd’s will disposes of her marriage-gift estate (Faccombe) and confirms freehold land to her daughter “to dispose of as she pleases.” Ana bought her house with her first husband and then inherited it sole, granting a life interest to her second husband while passing ultimate ownership to her daughter. This pattern, repeated across centuries, shows that widowhood could be a crucible of female economic independence, even if it depended on the demographic fortune of male death.
3. How do the listed possessions in a will function as symbolic extensions of the testator’s identity?
Each item carries a weight of skill, memory, or social performance. Wynflæd’s “double badger-skin gown” and her “red tent” are not just expensive objects; they signal her command of luxury craft and her presence in the mobile courtly world of mead-horns and drinking etiquette. Ana’s “large trunk of Panamanian cedar with its lock and key” and her “wheat-coloured shawl” worth ten pesos reflect a household-based economy where moveable goods were both practical wealth and markers of respectability. The wills transform these objects from ephemeral possessions into a curated museum of a life, chosen for legacy.
4. What limits does the written will reveal in women’s agency, even as it records their power?
The very act of making a will required access to literacy and legal institutions dominated by men—church scribes, notaries, and royal courts. Wynflæd’s homestead bequest is contingent on “the king grant it to her as King Edward granted it to Brihtwyn her mother,” revealing that ultimate authority rested with the male sovereign. Ana’s will, while granting freedom and property, also bequeaths two enslaved people, mother and child, perpetuating the very bondage from which she had escaped. The written will, then, is a mirror of its society: it expands women’s agency but cannot wholly transcend the hierarchies of class, race, and gender that framed their lives.
Conclusion
Across the “dusk of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Enlightenment,” the written will stands as one of the most durable symbols of female self-determination in Unquiet Women. It is a document of paradox—both a legal cage and a key to liberation, a product of male institutional power and a conduit for a woman’s last word. By reading these testaments with the care of an archaeologist sifting shards, Max Adams proves that the unquiet women of history did not simply vanish; they bequeathed us their voices, item by item, for those willing to listen.