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.
Author(s): Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell, Julie Hotchin
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 256
City: London
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
