Women and Work in Premodern Europe

Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation, c. 1100-1800

Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell, Julie Hotchin, Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell, Julie Hotchin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315475073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

1Approaching women and work in premodern Europe

Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell, and Julie Hotchin

Because it hath pleased God to bless me with many children and so caused me to observe many things falling out to mothers and to their children, I thought good to open my minde concerning a speciall matter belonging to all childe-bearing women, seriously to consider of: and to manifest my minde the better, even to write of this matter, so farre as God shall please to direct me; in summe, the matter I meane, Is the duty of nursing due by mothers to their owne children.¹

Elizabeth Clinton’s perception of her duties as a woman in her 1622 advice manual, The Countesse of Lincolnes nurserie, carries with it important implications for contemporary understandings of women and work in premodern Europe. Clinton believed (‘thought good’) that sharing her observations and experiences with other mothers through the medium of literature was an important and socially valuable activity. This activity would instil Christian virtues both in mother and child, and, according to some commentators, expiate her inability to breastfeed her own children.² The Countesse of Lincolnes nurserie thus projects an impression of this noblewoman in which the roles of mother, author, and teacher are intertwined, a complex image which harks back to historical forebears, such as Dhuoda and Christine de Pizan.³ Clinton’s ‘work’, as with the work of the women discussed throughout the present collection of essays, holds many meanings. It is constituted by Clinton’s lived experience as mother certainly, but embedded within it also was her understanding of herself and her (re)productive roles in relation to both God and her child-bearing peers, and of her conception of herself as a teacher and writer. We should pause to remind ourselves that each of these experiences formed part of Elizabeth Clinton’s professed self-identity.

It is with a view to understanding and assessing the complexity of women’s working lives that Women and Work in Premodern Europe, c. 1100–1800 explores the interrelated perspectives of women’s experiences of work; their working relationships with other women, men, and God; and the cultural representation of women’s participation across various spheres of endeavour. This requires the integration of cultural, intellectual, and economic activities into the repertoire of what work means, and did mean, to women and men in the past. The temporal and geographic scope through which women and work are examined spans roughly 1100–1800 and covers a large expanse of western Europe, including Germany, France and the Netherlands, and England. Throughout the volume, premodern is used as an inclusive term that refers to the period ranging from the medieval through to the latter phase of the early modern era.⁴ This volume has two aims: to demonstrate how a more encompassing concept of work extends to a variety of women’s (and of course, men’s) occupations beyond the purely economic, and to examine women’s enterprising strategies to negotiate the parameters shaping their intellectual, cultural, emotional, and economic labours.

There is, of course, a danger with opening a volume that explores women’s work with the example of Elizabeth Clinton. It may suggest that we still find it hard to separate women’s work from childrearing and the domestic economy. Elizabeth’s example may also more subtly reinforce the idea that elite women’s work was often related to literary endeavour, which, despite the constraints of gender roles, was an accustomed activity for elite women to perform.⁵ However, women were heavily involved in childrearing and in literary activities from the medieval to modern periods; to deny this would be to make the mistake of confusing historical reality with lazily made stereotypes, the latter of which is a genuine cause for concern and something feminist historians since the 1960s have worked hard to correct. As scholars of women’s work in premodern Europe have increasingly shown, the domestic or family economy was only one of various possible domains of women’s labour, and a woman’s life cycle, while significant, did not determine all aspects of an individual’s working life.⁶ Elizabeth’s decision to write about the duty, as she saw it, for mothers to nurse their children illustrates how her reproductive, intellectual, and emotional labours equally constituted work alongside occupations performed in return for remuneration. Collectively, the authors in this volume examine a more encompassing view of women’s work which advances our understanding of women’s experiences, the intricacies of their working relationships, and how women’s working activities were represented in different cultural milieux.

Uncovering women’s work: Methods and sources

Work is a category that is historically contingent and the meanings attributed to it in a given time and place reflect cultural values about those activities characterised as ‘work’.⁷ In line with our aim to reconceive the idea of ‘work’, a term discussed in greater detail in the next section, this volume extends current research that historicises changing ideas of work across the premodern period. This aim reflects our contemporary historical moment in which the nature of work and its crucial role in shaping identity is being redefined and expanded.⁸ From the 1960s feminist scholars focused effort on expanding concepts of work in its economic sense to include women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labour in the home. Current articulations of labour are similarly being broadened by researchers in a range of social science disciplines to expand what is recognised as work to include emotional and cognitive effort, and other various ‘immaterial’ activities.⁹ One significant development arising from the work of Sheilagh Ogilvie has been to identity occupations according to ‘verb’ descriptions rather than ‘noun’ descriptors.¹⁰ Evidence of women’s work is therefore expanded beyond occupational titles (for example, ‘seamstress’) to include more complex phrases which are found across a wide range of sources that reveal how women (and men) actually spent their time (for example, ‘carrying bricks’).¹¹ The chapters in this volume employ both noun and verb approaches to understanding women’s work. For example, Sarah Randles’ fine-grained discussion of terminology focuses on occupational titles, while the women described in the chapters by Nicholas Dean Brodie and Jeremy Goldberg hold no occupational titles but nevertheless clearly spent their time in particular ways to ensure their livelihoods.¹² By exploring the array of historical meanings attributed to work for and, importantly, by women themselves, the chapters in this volume re-evaluate concepts and experiences of work as sites of social, economic, and cultural production in which women’s identities were created and performed.

Building on our aim to extend the concepts and language used to analyse historical women’s working practices, our contributors examine how women’s working experiences were intricately intertwined with larger forces that shaped their lives, such as legal constraints, familial demands and expectations, political circumstances, and social mores. This volume thus positions women’s work both within and beyond established domestic and economic parameters. Collectively, the authors investigate the diverse range of activities that could constitute work for European women within social, cultural, and economic spheres and the relationships that shaped women’s experiences of work. Through the critical elaboration of original case studies of women’s work in given times and places, our collection adds to an emerging body of research into women’s working lives that focuses attention on how women ‘manipulated and negotiated the legal, social and cultural constraints placed upon their work (and their lives)’.¹³ Contributors to this volume investigate the diversity of women’s working activities, the intricacies of their interactions with other women and men, and how they negotiated the limits of authority or other constraints they encountered. The picture that emerges from these studies is one of ‘enterprising’ women. We employ the term here in the sense used by Daryl Hafter and Nina Kushner in their study of women and work in eighteenth-century France to reflect not only women’s enterprise in the commercial sense, but more broadly to refer to the resourceful, creative, and imaginative ways in which women reacted and responded to their diverse circumstances.

Cumulatively, the chapters uncover common themes and patterns across the breadth of activities examined as work. Women’s literary endeavours contributed significantly to the cultural and intellectual environments in which medieval women lived. E. Jane Burns examines the creative endeavours of the fictional women who inhabit the thirteenth-century French chansons de toile to explore how female cloth workers voice their experiences of love. In these chansons, the women sing laments while working, a practice which has a long tradition dating back to antiquity.¹⁴ The capacity of women to create literary spaces as a means to work within existing patriarchal structures to pursue a range of productive endeavours is also examined by Diana Jeske and Ellen Thorington, who show us how women adopted and adapted literary conventions to shape culture and who self-consciously referred to writing as labour. Jeske explores these themes in her study of twelfth-century epistolary culture in the letter collection from the Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, while Thorington addresses similar questions in her study of Christine de Pizan.

Turning to the topics of textile industries and domestic labour, Randles explores women’s involvement in textile production in western Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, while Jeremy Goldberg’s contribution looks at the essential domestic and economic work of urban bourgeois wives in later medieval England. Both chapters deal with household activities. Randles examines the gendered nature of textile production, exploring how the materiality of the household created constraints and yet offered opportunities for women to participate in vital productive work. Randles’ chapter also offers readers a wide-ranging survey of how the historiography around this topic has developed and effectively challenges assumptions that medieval textile production was the preserve of women only. Her chapter offers both original research into textile history as well as a vital synthesis of prevailing trends within the discipline. Goldberg also explores a range of documentary, literary, and visual sources to demonstrate the variety of activities recognised as women’s ‘household work’, including domestic, sexual, and kinship work.

The extent to which women’s work enabled them to assume positions of authority or leadership was often limited during this period, although women could exercise the authority of office in certain circumstances.¹⁵ Julie Hotchin’s study of the work of monastic governance focuses on one office in which women did exercise authority, that of abbess. Her analysis examines the relational nature of women’s monastic leadership in late medieval Germany. She shows how the quality of nuns’ interactions with clerical officials influenced the nature and scope of how women exercised authority and governed the monastery. Like Hotchin, Ariadne Schmidt examines female governance but in the urban setting of early modern Dutch towns. She explores the shared and yet distinct experiences of women seeking to fulfil different roles in civic and guild networks across Dutch cities. Her chapter also includes a fascinating discussion of women who sat on the board of the Gouda prison, illustrating how women deployed gender ideologies to assert their authority in their conflicted interactions with their male counterparts.

How women with limited opportunities made ends meet, or found themselves in situations that circumscribed action, is the subject of chapters by Brodie and Anne Montenach, and is an issue also raised in the chapter by Burns. Brodie’s approach to beggary and vagabondage in Tudor England introduces concepts relating to the absence of work and the circumstances in which begging could be considered suitable ‘work’ in the absence of other gainful activity.¹⁶ While an ‘absence of (honest) work’ to support oneself was deemed criminal, Montenach’s analysis of the early modern Lyonnais textile trade demonstrates how a fiercely regulated industry forced some women (and men) into ‘illicit work’ (criminal endeavours) precisely to ‘earn a living’ in a conscionable manner. Here, Montenach’s focus on female agency and the scope various women had to carve out a role for themselves, however illicit, to create work in these trades adds new insight into questions of female authority. Brodie and Montenach demonstrate that women expected to work to maintain themselves and avoid dependence on the community, demonstrating how economic exigency outweighed patriarchal constrain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures, maps, and tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Approaching women and work in premodern Europe
• 2 Working through letters: Women’s voices and epistolary culture in the Tegernseer Liebesbriefe
• 3 Uncourtly cloth workers in the Old French sewing songs
• 4 ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’: Gender and textile production in the Middle Ages
• 5 ‘Fortune ce mestier m’aprist’: Christine de Pizan as writer, teacher, and Voice of Wisdom
• 6 Home work: The bourgeois wife in later medieval England
• 7 Gender, authority, and monastic work: Holy Cross in Brunswick, c. 1500
• 8 ‘Any Man or Woman beyng hole & mighty in body’: Women’s work under Tudor vagrancy law
• 9 Working at the margins: Women and illicit economic practices in Lyon in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• 10 Contested authority: Working women in leading positions in the early modern Dutch urban economy
• Index