This chapter highlights the crucial role of property in the history of rights, both as one of the key concepts driving the development of rights theories (and protections) onward from an early time, and their modern adaptations in the eighteenth century. Given property’s oversized importance in this history, it is surprisingly missing from many recent accounts. But since the French Revolution, property has been at the heart of most political efforts to secure and protect rights. As this chapter demonstrates, the centrality of property for so many later reforms can in large part be credited to the insistent claims of the Physiocrats. Political society, they argued, must extend natural rights, rather than replace them with positive laws. Economic circulation was itself part and parcel of a “natural order,” with subjective rights at its basis. The chapter suggests that contemporary theories and assessments of the role of rights in political society remain partial as long as they do not include an understanding of the historical role that property has played among them.

Books, both real ones and those described in texts, are effective vehicles for women’s genealogies in medieval narratives because of their tactile form and ability to be transmitted. Medieval writers understood books not merely as containing genealogies but also as key participants in genealogical construction and propagation. This chapter explores books in the early twelfth-century Vita sanctae Margaretae reginae Scotorum, commissioned by the new English queen, Edith/Matilda, about her mother, Margaret of Scotland. The Vita asserts a maternal inheritance for Edith/Matilda premised in part on the literary patronage, physical interactions with books, and pious reading of mother and daughter, creating a nonhuman genealogy parallel to their biological one that negotiates a complex Anglo-Scottish-Norman history. This chapter examines the Vita in relation to depictions of book patronage by Emma of Normandy, Adela of Blois, and Constance FitzGilbert; submerged book miracles in the lives of Cuthbert, Columba, and Modwenna; and Margaret’s extant gospel book.