“[A] significant and highly original study.” — CHOICE
“[A] lively and combative book. . . . It will be quite impossible for social or legal historians in the future to ignore the arguments presented here; the subject will never be quite the same again, and that is a real achievement.” — Times Literary Supplement
“Eileen Spring has brought a fresh vision to the history of land law. . . . This is the best kind of feminist history. . . . A highly original and provocative book which overturns a great deal of accepted wisdom, with implications for legal, family, and women’s history.” — Continuity and Change
“This is an admirable study, lucidly and economically argued, which makes its points about the inequitable treatment of heiresses-at-law and widows clearly and forcefully. . . . It deserves to be read not only by specialists in the development of the law of property, but by all those interested in the propertied élite of late-medieval and early-modern England.” — Cambridge Law Journal
“Eileen Spring has written a fine and provocative book that asks us to reexamine many of the accepted views of the development of English land law. . . . Spring accomplishes an essential goal in writing legal history, she makes a highly technical and complex topic accessible to a wide audience and she does so with a timely twist.” — Law and History Review
“An intelligent and engaging book that is a major contribution to both the history of law and the history of women. Ingeniously original, Spring’s work is sure to generate a great deal of rethinking on the part of those interested in the social history of land law.” — Morris S. Arnold, United States Court of Appeals
“Eileen Spring has written a highly original book on the history of the common law of landholding, and the first to focus attention upon the heiress at law. This is an important contribution to the understanding of the interrelationship between the history of the family and that of the legal institutions associated with it.” — A. W. Brian Simpson, University of Michigan Law School
