Manus
idea · 2 works · 5 mentions · 7 anchored passages
manus · in manu · coming under the hand · hand · marital power · power of hand
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
The legal subjection of a wife (or a son's wife) to the power of a paterfamilias, treated by analogy as placing her in the position of a daughter or granddaughter for inheritance purposes.
Idem iuris est et 〈in〉 uxoris persona quae in manu est, quia filiae loco est, et in nuru quae in manu filii est, quia neptis loco est.
but the patria potestas over these children vested not in the father but in the grandfather, and if the marriage was accompanied with power of hand (manus), marital power over the wife, this vested not in the husband but in the husband’s father.
Olim itaque tribus modis in manum conueniebant, usu farreo coemptione.
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The Roman legal term and institution of a husband's power over his wife, likened to paternal power.
The next stage in the legal history of Roman civil marriage is marked by the contrivance, very familiar to students of Roman law, by which the process of ‘coming under the hand’ was dispensed with, and the wife no longer became in law her husband’s daughter.
The term, a famous one in legal history, is manus, the Latin word for ‘hand,’ and the wife was said convenire in manum, to come under the hand of her husband.