Women and Work in Premodern Europe: Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation, c. 1100-1800

Description

This book re-evaluates and extends understandings about how work was conceived and what it could entail for women in the premodern period in Europe from c. 1100 to c. 1800. It does this by building on the impressive growth in literature on women’s working experiences, and by adopting new interpretive approaches that expand received assumptions about what constituted 'work' for women. While attention to the diversity of women’s contributions to the economy has done much to make the breadth of women’s experiences of labour visible, this volume takes a more expansive conceptual approach to the notion of work and considers the social and cultural dimensions in which activities were construed and valued as work. This interdisciplinary collection thus advances concepts of work that encompass cultural activities in addition to more traditional economic understandings of work as employment or labour for production. The chapters reconceptualise and explore work for women by asking how the working lives of historical women were enacted and represented, and analyse the relationships that shaped women’s experiences of work across the European premodern period. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of contents List of figures, maps, and tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1 Approaching women and work in premodern Europe Uncovering women’s work: Methods and sources Work and its meanings Existing and new paradigms for understanding women’s work Themes: Experiences, relationships, and cultural representation Experiences Relationships Cultural representation Where to from here? Notes Select bibliography 2 Working through letters: Women’s voices and epistolary culture in the Tegernseer Liebesbriefe Letters as evidence of women’s work The Tegernsee manuscript: The context of a letter collection The work of networking: Women and the broader letter collection of Clm 19411 A tradition of intimacy: The literary context of the Tegernseer Liebesbriefe The influence of Ovid and the Heroides: Tegernseer Liebesbriefe 1–8 The influence of Cicero: Liebesbrief 10 and the redefinition of literary and courtly traditions Conclusion Appendices Appendix 1: Foliation of Clm 19411 Appendix 2: Tegernseer Liebesbriefe overview Notes Select bibliography 3 Uncourtly cloth workers in the Old French sewing songs Lienor’s song: Bele Aye More than embroidery Working for others Sewing as women’s professional mestier? Cloth workers as ‘foreigners’ Physical abuse Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 4 ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’: Gender and textile production in the Middle Ages Historiography and methodology Sources for textile history and problems of interpretation Civic records Visual evidence Literary sources Lexical evidence Material and social influences shaping gender and textile work Economic influences shaping gender and textile work Ideology and iconography Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 5 ‘Fortune ce mestier m’aprist’: Christine de Pizan as writer, teacher, and Voice of Wisdom On becoming a writer Christine’s vision of the writer’s role The wisdom of Christine Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 6 Home work: The bourgeois wife in later medieval England Documenting the bourgeois wife Learning to become a bourgeois wife Contributing to the familial economy Household manager Childcare ‘Kinship work’: Forging social networks Chamber work: Sex and intimacy Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 7 Gender, authority, and monastic work: Holy Cross in Brunswick, c. 1500 Holy Cross and the convent diary Gender and governance arrangements at Holy Cross Managing spiritual work Managing temporal affairs Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 8 ‘Any Man or Woman beyng hole & mighty in body’: Women’s work under Tudor vagrancy law Historiographical trends A lack of women’s work: Mighty men and women Women’s work: Chastisement and charity Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 9 Working at the margins: Women and illicit economic practices in Lyon in the late seventeenth... Women and the cloth trades in Lyon: An overview Women’s work at the margin of professional guilds Women’s work in the underground economy: The piquage d’once Smuggling inside the city: Women and the calicos trade Conclusion Notes Select bibliography 10 Contested authority: Working women in leading positions in the early modern Dutch urban economy The legal position of women in Holland Guilds: Defining positions of authority Conflicts in the workshop Authority contested Conflicts in the boards Conclusion Notes Select bibliography Index