Experimental Selves: Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe. Christopher Braider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. xiv + 420 pp. $90.
ownership claims to some of their wealth. At times they also had to deal with challenges to their ability to dispose of their goods, as in Tuula Rantala’s essay looking at widows’ planning strategies in fifteenth-century Sweden. This volume recommends itself with its careful consideration of the ways law and practice interacted, as well as its attention to how gender influenced how law could be deployed to carry out final wishes. It is also valuable in bringing the legal system and practice of early modern Scandinavia to the fore of legal studies, which have often focused more on studies of England and France, broadening our understanding of early modern legal histories.