Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king''s forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of...