Male Dominance. The increasing legal emphasis on the male lineage paralleled a rising concern among male religious, literary, and political writers with the authority and role of the male head of household. With few exceptions, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews; English, French, Italians, and Germans; highly educated humanists and illiterate street singers; all agreed that women should be subservient and that husbands should rule over their wives. Indeed, there is no other issue that men of this period—and apparently most women— agreed upon so completely. This notion was not only an intellectual construct, but shaped legal codes throughout Europe, with married women always under the legal control of their husbands, and adult single women and widows often required to have a male guardian oversee their legal and financial affairs. Husbands were generally given the right to coerce or...