The following two chapters place the proliferation of institutions to assist unmarried women in the sixteenth century in the context of an inevitable tension and conflict between the prevailing inheritance system (as the material expression of medieval and early modern lineage ideology) and the economic and demographic realities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century families. To use terminology borrowed from the social sciences, the family and inheritance systems of sixteenth-century Italy, and to an even greater extent, sixteenth-century Florence, were functional only to the extent that they defined the norms for transmission of property from one generation to another. Systems of inheritance defined in Roman law, their resurgence in the twelfth century, and their codification in communal statutes rested on assumptions that were too narrow to accommodate the economic and social realities of the early modern Tuscan marriage market. How successfully one could respond to such exigencies depended in part on the flexibility of the system itself and in part on the creativity of those who would circumvent it, as well as of those whom it served most successfully. Thus, this chapter first examines the relationship between gender and lineage ideology in the development of a specifically and self-consciously aristocratic culture in sixteenth-century Florence and argues that the primary force driving the developing status culture of consumption (and its attendant social crises of abandonment) was not the ideology of gender but the ideology of lineage. The following chapter then discusses the relationship between law and practice and specifically how, given the exigencies of the law, families worked charitable institutions into their marital and lineage strategies.