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§ Rava says that Rav Naḥman says: There are five types of gifts to which specific halakhot apply, but the halakhot do not apply until the owners write a deed granting all of their property to another without reserving anything for themselves, and they are as follows: The gift of a person on his deathbed, a gift to one’s Canaanite slave, a gift to one’s wife, a gift to one’s sons, and the gift of a woman who shelters her property from her prospective husband by transferring her property to another before her marriage. In this latter case the Sages instituted that if her husband dies or divorces her she can reclaim the property.
We explore the economic and symbolic values that accrue to the bed, bedding, and the bedroom in late medieval England, as described in wills and household accounts, and as evoked in literary and artistic imagery, those associated with birth and inheritance and also those portrayed in images of death. “Childbed” and “deathbed” are terms that frame the human lifecycle. They also invoke the most important item of furniture in the premodern household.