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 constraints that limited women’s work or restricted it to the home. Schmidt’s chapter on the contested relationships in early modern Dutch guilds offers similar insights into how often women’s involvement in trades was permitted or tolerated by the authorities, subject to individual circumstances and the nature of the activity in which they were involved. Collectively, the chapters encourage scholars to rethink modern assumptions about the culturally contingent meanings and understandings of legitimate and illegitimate work, the working relationships women formed, and the cultural value of their work in the premodern period.

The sources explored in Women and Work are unusually rich and wide-ranging, allowing the volume to demonstrate a range of methodological approaches to identifying and analysing women’s work. Readers will uncover epistolary volumes, ego documents, and philosophical reflections; manuscript and art historical evidence; conduct literature, chansons de toile, and romance; monastic charters and narrative accounts; civic, guild, and parish records; probate inventories, court records, and statutory law. The diversity of sources brings to light a rich array of evidence concerning premodern attitudes towards, and the lived experiences of, women and work.

Many of the authors in this volume use institutional sources, for example from law courts and guilds, to understand the social, cultural, and legal expectations of how work was organised in a structural, formal, or normative sense. Goldberg, Montenach, and Schmidt all make use of similar sources which nevertheless originate from places as diverse as northern England, the Netherlands, and Lyon. By basing their analysis on comparable institutional documents, these scholars show how women variously negotiated, challenged, or inserted themselves into these structures across western Europe. Brodie turns to English legal records to provide rich evidence of how women interacted with structures that regulated work. His chapter illustrates the continual negotiation of cultural expectations that poor women ought to work and how this attitude informed legal and civic practices. Goldberg’s sensitive use of both legal sources and literary material produces a nuanced discussion of the interrelations between norm and practice which shows what can be gained from interdisciplinary analysis for understanding cultural expectations and women’s behaviour. Randles’ critique of how the historiography of women’s textile production has at times been informed by and reproduced gender ideologies presents a salutary lesson for researchers employing documentary and visual sources of women and textile work. Her analysis of different categories of sources, including documentary records, as well as visual, literary, and lexical evidence, provides insights into what activities men and women performed and the material circumstances that influenced this. Her close readings of context, especially concerning visual analysis, identifies the challenges inherent in interpreting evidence, and provides valuable methodological models for further work on these topics. Her chapter also offers a model of how practice-led research, and knowledge about how certain textile activities or tools would have been used, can refine and reshape our knowledge about women’s activities.

Chapters in this volume collectively explore women’s work across western Europe in order to promote discussions about women’s working experiences which are attentive to regional differences and particularities but which also observe similarities across geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts. The cultural settings examined include religious, courtly, and urban environments. Hotchin’s chapter focuses on the leadership of northern German religious women, while Jeske’s chapter investigates Bavarian monastic literary culture. Thorington explores Christine de Pizan’s professional work as a writer within the French courtly environment, while Burns likewise turns to medieval French literary culture to examine the dark underside of textile work in the chansons de toile. Several contributors examine facets of women’s working lives within civic and urban contexts. The chapters by Montenach on the illicit work of eighteenth-century Lyon women and Schmidt’s work on early modern Dutch women focus attention on women’s interactions with guild and civic structures, with a keen eye on how pragmatic concerns of an urban community could support women’s activities even when they countered gendered ideology. Randles’ chapter integrates English and continental European sources to produce a richer picture of the gendered nature of medieval textile production. Goldberg’s exploration of wives in English urban households shows why we need to understand all of the roles women took on in households in order to create a holistic image of their working experiences. Brodie’s analysis of vagabondage and beggary across Tudor England restores female vagrants to the historical record. Each of the authors share the desire to reconceptualise and explore work for women in order to re-evaluate and extend understandings about how work was conceived and what it could entail.

Work and its meanings

The concept of work is imprecise, varies greatly over time, and is highly contested.¹⁷ Moreover, different cultures and languages differ with respect to the activities that are encompassed by a label like ‘work’ and those that are not. Indeed, commentators of the history of the idea of work in Europe contend that even activities customarily understood as ‘work’ in an economic sense in modern Western societies need to be understood not as separate from but embedded within social, political, and religious dimensions of life.¹⁸ As Jürgen Kocka observes in his historiographical overview of the history of the term, a general concept of work ‘in the sense of a purposeful application of physical and mental forces in order to fulfil needs’ emerged only slowly.¹⁹ It is instructive, then, to turn briefly to the semantic history of the concept of work as it was understood in the medieval and early modern periods for what this reveals about the activities that have constituted work in the past and the evolution of the term as it is understood in post-industrial societies today.

From the perspective of social economic history, the terms work and labour are widely understood to be synonymous, yet many European languages contain two etymologically unrelated terms for what are now often thought of as similar activities. There was no unified view of what activities constituted work in medieval Europe, although vernacular cultures associated terms for work such as work, ouvrer, werken with material undertakings that produced some kind of artefact. On the other hand the meaning of labour, using terms such as labour, travailler, or arbeiten, was closely identified with physical effort, pain, and suffering as an immaterial endeavour.²⁰ Despite these philosophical distinctions, in practice the boundaries between the immaterial and material associations of labour and work blurred early on. For instance, some of the earliest uses of ‘work’ in English language sources (variously weorc, werc, wirke) show a wide range of meanings, including acts or deeds either individually performed or collectively enacted, tasks or functions needing to be carried out, or activities involving mental or physical effort.²¹

Medieval theological understandings of work also emphasised its significance in moral terms, with devotional and secular tracts referring to ‘werkes of almus’ and a ‘werke of charitee’, whereby the work in question expressed moral qualities and purpose.²² The notion that humanity was condemned to labour primarily as a means to ensure subsistence as a consequence of the Fall lent the weight of moral force to physical effort.²³ However, labour was also valued as a means of avoiding the evils associated with idleness. Labour was further held to afflict the body, thereby restraining sexual appetites, and was considered to be a means of enacting compassion and achieving salvation.²⁴ For some theologians, labour thus aligned the labouring body with primarily spiritual and moral aims, rather than material gain (aside from that which was essential to live). Although there is no doubt that work was commonly used in medieval and early modern sources in relation to an activity which was productive, remunerative, and generally associated with actions relating to occupations and employment, at least in some premodern cultures, work extended beyond having associations with economic value to, at times, take on some of the moral overtones carried by the term labour.

It was primarily from the industrial period that work became more closely identified with remunerative activity and shifts in attitude that prioritised economic production. By 1800 the concept of work acquired the meaning with which we are most familiar today, becoming closer to the idea of ‘labour’ as working for subsistence and denoting earning for a living through some form of market-related activity, primarily but not solely for wages and salaries.²⁵ While this volume does not extend beyond 1800, it is worth being aware of the extent to which this latter concept of work now implicitly shapes so much of the contemporary thought and scholarship about work in all preceding periods.²⁶

Despite the differentiated meanings associated with work over time, the most recent studies of historical women’s work have tended to remain embedded within the economic model which regards work as a sanctioned commoditised activity directly linked to various modes of production. As a consequence, the question of work has primarily been investigated through the lens of economic and labour paradigms.²⁷ Within this framework, researchers are seeking to expand in innovative and important ways the activities that are understood as constituting work in this economic sense. In her project on English rural women’s work, for instance, Jane Whittle adopts an expanded definition of work that recognises the contribution of activities undertaken to benefit others within the household as an element of broader economic well-being. She thus defines work as ‘any activity that could be substituted with purchased goods or services’, arguing that these too ‘should be considered “productive” and part of the economy’.²⁸ Such research has importantly suggested that domestic chores, such as childcare, were more monetised than previously thought, an insight which complements Ruth Mazo Karras’ observations underlining the significance of the domestic arena to the construction of the economy.²⁹ Much of this scholarship has been a response to a broader desire to make women’s work ‘visible’, to find evidence of it in different archival sources, and to argue for women’s economic contribution in non-traditional areas. This attention to the diversity of women’s contributions to the economy has greatly expanded our knowledge of women’s experiences of labour. The sheer breadth of our understandings of women’s work across agricultural, domestic, and labour markets is testament to the success of these efforts.³⁰

However, there is a risk that in overlooking premodern distinctions between notions of work and labour that we are occluding activities undertaken by women that did not have a perceptible relationship with a monetised economy. This is central to how ideas about gender are constructed. As Goldberg comments in his chapter, taking only a narrow view of work impoverishes our ability to understand the full extent of women’s (and men’s) lives in the past. Concepts of work that privilege a particular type of employed activity, even when this activity is shown to be broader and more visible than previously accepted, still disregard the actual activities of many women in troubling ways. For example, the term ‘housewife’ as it is understood today lacks the depth of occupations that formerly were attributed to it. The classical Greek oikos referred to the prudent economic and moral management of the household, the term from which we derive the concept of the oeconomy.³¹ Although the importance of oeconomics in understanding how household management was once seen as analogous with the governance of the polity has been largely overlooked, medieval concepts of work embraced the idea of work as an effort or labour, inclusively defined to encompass spiritual and moral toil.

This collection aims to broaden existing scholarly approaches to work to incorporate the devotional, intellectual, and emotional elements that comprised much of the work carried out by women, as well as by men.³² Studies of work informed by economic history approaches tend to marginalise the inherent nature of work as a cultural activity, an activity whose productive quality entailed the reproduction of social relations and values. As Patrick Joyce argues, to fully understand the meanings of work in a given historical context, we must look beyond the realm of economic activity to consider the social and cultural dimensions in which activities were construed and valued.³³ Moreover, as Karras suggests, the fact that an activity is not identified as an occupation or endeavour that we might consider being a form of work today does not mean that it should be excluded from our investigations.³⁴ Kocka’s general concept of work as the ‘purposeful application of physical or mental forces’ in order to fulfil different needs is therefore a useful umbrella definition to capture what we mean by ‘work’, whether that need is material, cultural, or intellectual.³⁵

In responding to this call for a more inclusive definition of work the chapters in this volume advance concepts of work that encompass cultural and spiritual activities, in addition to economic understandings of work as employment or labour for production. Chapters by Brodie and Montenach deploy work in terms that primarily relate women’s actions to labour or economic production, or to the effects of its absence. Jeske, Hotchin, and Thorington reveal through their examination of literary and religious endeavours that work is also a term that is appropriate to describe activity involving mental effort and the production of cultural knowledge. Chapters by Burns, Goldberg, Randles, and Schmidt show how these cultural and economic aspects are intertwined and how women’s labours had cultural value and crucial economic importance.

Existing and new paradigms for understanding women’s work

Our volume’s title, Women and Work in Premodern Europe, consciously acknowledges the seminal volumes of essays edited by Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, and Barbara Hanawalt in the mid-1980s.³⁶ Contributors to these volumes initiated critical exploratory forays into women’s participation in economic life in continental Europe or, more narrowly, England, as part of the second wave of feminist scholarship seeking to restore women to the historical record. Research over the ensuing three decades has shown that working women were ubiquitous in most premodern industries and that their labour was crucial to the survival and reproduction of the household at all levels of the social scale. Such work has stimulated an academic industry which, over the last three decades, has produced an extensive volume of research uncovering the breadth and depth of women’s involvement across a spectrum of economic activities spanning urban and, to a lesser extent, rural communities across Europe from Ireland to Russia, and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.³⁷ Research has extended from the most recognised occupations of brewing and almost all aspects of the textile trades (both legal and illegal), to the crafts of various artisans such as pipe makers, chandlers, dyers, scribes and illuminators, and blacksmiths.³⁸

Collectively, this important body of research has presented a kaleidoscope of evidence bringing to light women’s involvement in many occupations across the premodern period. However, scholars widely agree that while the socio-historic circumstances framing women’s working lives may have varied over time according to locale, social rank, and so on, a consistent feature of women’s working experiences was the patriarchal framework which variably limited women’s access to positions of authority and status. Labelled the ‘new orthodoxy’ by Rafe Blaufarb, this scholarly position acknowledges the significant work of earlier scholars such as Judith M. Bennett, Martha C. Howell, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, who have done much to make medieval and early modern women’s work visible and to understand the constraints restricting women’s activities.³⁹ A new range of questions seeking to understand how women opened up opportunities or took advantage of their circumstances to create spaces in which they could work has been stimulated by this current research. Refocusing our questions in a way that recognises female agency across different fields of economic, intellectual, and domestic activity places women, their actions, and their aspirations at the centre of research. Thus, while we know the critical importance of women’s labour to pre-industrial economies, we now need to think more deeply about how women negotiated prevailing structures and frequently restrictive personal circumstances to achieve their aims. How did women create spaces for themselves in which to build relationships which facilitated their pursuit of particular goals and fulfillment of their personal, familial, or social needs? Ultimately, the authors in this volume demonstrate how women creatively grasped opportunities and demonstrated enterprising behaviour across a range of occupations and fields of endeavour.

By centring attention on women’s active negotiation of their institutional and personal circumstances, chapters in this collection bear out an important recent observation that women’s agency and subordination were ‘not mutually exclusive states’:[O]

ne possible way to move beyond the agency-subordination divide is to assume from the outset that patriarchal authority in early modern [and, we would add, medieval] Europe was limited by a variety of forces rather than to assume its rigidity and dominance. Thus, monolithic social norms and institutional structures are no longer the straw men against which women’s activities are evaluated; rather, women’s activities and responses themselves are the baseline for comparative analysis.⁴⁰

Theresa Earenfight and Therese Martin have productively illustrated how ideas about women’s power and agency could be explored by focusing on the creation and negotiation of relationships.⁴¹ Developing this approach, authors in this volume highlight where women’s relationships with men and with other women can be characterised as collaborative, interdependent, or mutually dependent. Instructive parallels with these three concepts— collaboration, mutual dependency, and interdependency—can be drawn from similar analytical approaches currently applied to medieval rulership, the exercise of joint aristocratic lordship, and interactions between men and women in religious life.⁴² Just as terms such as agency offered a more nuanced approach in women’s history to traditional notions of power across social ranks, and recent approaches in art history urge greater attention to women’s participation in all aspects of the creative process, so too does the emphasis on relationships across the spectrum of mutual dependency, collaboration, or interdependency highlight how women found ways to assert their interests or to have their activities recognised or valued as legitimate, despite inequalities of power and access to economic resources.⁴³

As Janine M. Lanza notes for the early modern period, women ‘used their relationships to men, as daughters, wives and widows, as well as their skills, persistence and hard work, to open doors that might otherwise be closed to them’.⁴⁴ Lanza’s observation about the capacity of women to navigate existing structures and relationships to participate actively in their worlds holds for women across the period; hence a key theme of the volume is the question of how and in what circumstances women negotiated structures that constrained or enabled them through their relationships.

Scholars attentive to women’s agency recognise that the nature of women’s experiences and their opportunities expanded and contracted according to local circumstance across the premodern period. Here, the question of change or continuity over time is particularly apt. As noted, one consistent feature of women’s lives was their inferior status compared with men in most areas of life. For this reason, Bennett argues that rather than channelling research into chronological timeframes marked out by broad socio-institutional events, such as the consolidation of the universities, the Reformation, or emergent humanism, we must acknowledge the multiple chronologies of women’s experiences, based variously on the specificity of location, time, social order, religion, ethnicity and so on.⁴⁵ Bennett prompts us to consider new periodisations based on women’s histories, and to feel comfortable thinking about long-term continuities. Wiesner-Hanks, however, has highlighted how emphasising continuities could risk essentialising women’s experiences, and that periodisation can illuminate change in women’s historical positions, particularly during the early modern period.⁴⁶ As historians, turning away from questions of change or continuity over time is unsettling as there is a deep-seated desire to pinpoint when and why women’s positions improved or declined and to make comparisons about women’s overall status across periods.⁴⁷ Importantly, Women and Work does not suggest that the experiences of womanhood were constant across the period or that patterns of women’s work developed in an even, continuous arc. Rather, it aims to trace the idiosyncratic dynamics shaping women’s individual and collective participation within the premodern European world at particular times and to show the value of original case studies to deepen our knowledge about the diversity of premodern women’s work and how this expands our understanding of concepts of work. We need to learn to study variation among women’s experiences without positing a straightforward transformation in the social or economic status of women. In this way we can understand the possibility that the patriarchal institutions and structures within which women manoeuvred could shift and change without much altering the force of patriarchal power. Furthermore, we need to think about what women’s history would look like if it were freed from the turning points and chronologies of traditional history.⁴⁸

This in part explains our choice of the expansive term ‘premodern’ as the focus of this volume. Few investigations into the nature of historical women’s working lives to date have encompassed the centuries prior to or beyond the imaginary temporal divide of 1500. Certainly, from a medievalist’s perspective, Bennett’s important study of English alewives, and Marjorie K. McIntosh’s examination of English women’s participation in the market economy, each trace fluctuations in the low relative value assigned to women’s work from 1300 to around 1620.⁴⁹ Additionally, Howell’s study of women’s economic production in northern France spans the fourteenth into the mid-sixteenth century.⁵⁰ From an early modernist’s perspective, studies more rarely glance back into the fifteenth century. While Wiesner’s investigation into urban working women in Renaissance Germany occasionally turns back towards the 1400s,⁵¹ more recent studies, such as Lanza’s work on gender and the economy in early modern France or Micheline White’s analysis of women and textual production in England at the same period, typically begin around 1500 or shortly thereafter.⁵² With notable exceptions, including James Farr’s studies of European artisans from 1300 into the twentieth century, Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf’s study of wage data between 1260 and 1850, and The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’s study of Britain’s occupational structure between 1379 and 1911, historical studies of work and workers more broadly have understandably shied away from a longue durée which encompasses significant structural, political, religious, and socio-economic change.⁵³

Women and Work adopts a generous timeframe, spanning the period from c. 1100 to c. 1800. This broad chronological span challenges the artificial periodisation which posits a break from the medieval to the early modern era around 1500, a framework which continues to inform much contemporary scholarship on women and their experiences of work and, indeed, the shape of medieval and modern history itself.⁵⁴ By including essays that span western Europe between c. 1100 and c. 1800, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly reappraisal of this field at a key moment in its development. At one end of this scale, Jeske’s study of the letters associated with the twelfth-century abbey of Tegernsee introduces us to the High Middle Ages, while chapters by Goldberg, Randles, Burns, Thorington, and Hotchin span the later Middle Ages of England, France, and Germany. Brodie’s contribution centres upon Tudor England, while Schmidt explores early modern Netherlands. Our terminus is Montenach’s study of eighteenth-century Lyon. Collectively, while all authors cautiously accept the basic premise that patriarchal structures were a consistent feature of the premodern world, Women and Work’s wide chronological scope encouraged contributors to attend to the specificities of women’s working experiences in case studies free from grand narratives positing change based on events and circumstances which may, or may not, have materially or culturally impacted on the lives of all individuals in the premodern period.

Themes: Experiences, relationships, and cultural representation

These subtitles distinguish the volume from the existing body of work on women’s working lives, stressing aspects of historical inquiry that reflect contemporary concerns with the construction of identity while building upon the broad tradition of earlier studies of women and work. Each theme is interlinked, illustrating how women’s experiences were dependent on the relationships they formed with other women and men, and vice versa.

Experiences

In our collection, ‘experiences’ encompass historical women’s lives and interpretation of circumstances, local examples, and case study approaches. In focusing their analyses on the experiences of premodern European women’s work, contributors to Women and Work employ a range of methodological approaches to their evidence to uncover the lived materiality of women’s lives. Our contributors acknowledge that the category of ‘woman’ is neither static nor unidimensional. Whether women were married, widowed, or single, living in urban or rural settings, their family background, access to training, and education all markedly shaped the economic and social opportunities available to them. There was wide variance too in the nature and scale of legal constraints and social customs that delineated women’s economic and cultural opportunities by region, place, and period.⁵⁵ Individual personality and attributes also influenced how women reacted to the constraints they encountered and the degree to which they desired or were able to negotiate their circumstances. The chief dimension shaping women’s working experiences, however, were their economic resources and ability to deploy them.

Elite women had access to greater material resources although, like their counterparts of lesser economic means, they also experienced legal, social, and familial constraints on their economic or cultural agency. Elite women usually married young and were often widowed at least once, which could grant them access to wealth in the form of property or other investments. As Goldberg’s chapter outlines, the work of married women of the mercantile elite was centred on the household, encompassing a complex range of economic, administrative, sociable, and emotional labours integral to the success of the domestic economy. Such women could also perform an important role in the wider economy, managing their own business, investing capital in trade, or managing property.⁵⁶ The nuns examined by Hotchin were also drawn from patrician families of similar status. The abbess’ work of monastic administration resembled in many respects a wife’s responsibility to manage wealthy secular households. Nuns, like their married counterparts, also managed property, cultivated vital social and patronage networks, directed their convent and its familia, and ensured their households were fed and clothed. These material labours provided the economic means to sustain the spiritual work of their intercessory prayer.⁵⁷

Women of elite social standing were best placed by virtue of their (relative) access to education, and their familial and patronage networks, to acquire the personal, literate, and cultural resources necessary to write. It comes as little surprise then, that the intellectual work by or attributed to women examined in this collection derives from erudite, courtly milieux in which certain women established a place for their intellectual energies and ethical instruction. Thorington traces the importance of Christine de Pizan’s paternal, spousal, and royal networks, which facilitated opportunities for her to take the highly unusual step to establish herself as a female writer. The female epistolary voices analysed by Jeske show women exercising cultural agency as literary and artistic patrons, and participating in and shaping courtly traditions of intimate relationships.

Women of more middling economic means participated in business, commerce, sales, and business partnerships. The breadth of their activities differed from those of men in scale rather than type, and in the scope open to women to take a leading role. Several contributors extend our understanding of the importance of women’s work within urban economies, highlighting the variety and extent of women’s activities beyond the purely domestic. Goldberg gives examples of wealthier wives who managed their own businesses in brewing or as chandlers, whereas wives in households of lesser means earned income through piecework in the textile trades or by intermittent day work. Randles’ chapter provides valuable evidence about the significance of women’s access both to raw materials and the objects needed to make particular textiles, and how this influenced textile production and women’s economic roles.

Current research into women’s interactions with craft guilds focuses attention on the extent of women’s involvement, and the fact that guilds did not uniformly or necessarily restrict women’s participation.⁵⁸ Chapters by Goldberg, Montenach, and Schmidt take as standard the assumptions of women’s involvement in guilds. The question the authors explore are therefore more nuanced—not were women involved, but how? In what capacity? How did they exploit loopholes, structures, or arrangements to carve out roles for themselves? What they have revealed is that women were involved at the margins, through illicit activity, or seeking to claim authority for themselves as widows to run the business, or they could be crucial to the functioning of a household including its workshop, in diverse ways as servants or family members who learned critical skills. Women and men of lesser status often encountered similar restrictions. Indeed, wives of masters may actually have had better access to certain guild privileges than some men.⁵⁹ These findings remind us of the ‘discordance between regulation and reality’, and how the legal frameworks of guilds ‘were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating businesses and working in workshops’.⁶⁰ Combined, these chapters offer valuable insights into the visibility and social recognition of the value of women’s labour to pre-industrial societies and cultures.

Hard work for impoverished women, irrespective of their marital status, was a harsh reality. Although sources that shed light on the experiences of poor women are less numerous than for elite, mercantile, and artisan women, several contributors employ creative approaches to uncover aspects of how poor and marginalised women made ends meet by labouring, selling, pilfering, or begging. Even when they did secure work, wage rates for women remained about one half to three quarters below those paid to men. In addition, work in service and other wage labour was low in status.⁶¹ As Jane Whittle has observed, ‘A flexible workforce of poorly paid women benefited the wider economy, but the degree it benefited medieval women themselves is questionable.’⁶² Several contributors examine how the activity of servants and other lower-status women provided labour that sustained the material wealth of elite households. Goldberg shows how a girl’s progression through various forms of domestic service could equip her with the training and skills to one day manage her own household, as the wife of an artisan. Burns’ sensitive reading of the Old French chansons de toile suggests the dark history of coerced labour that underpinned silk production and importation from the east, and raises questions about the structural relations and mutual dependencies between elite households and low-status women workers in late thirteenth-century Paris.⁶³ Montenach turns attention to how the illicit trade in silk thread and fabric in Lyon provided impoverished women with a means for survival. Importantly, she notes how on occasion civic and guild officials dealt flexibly with women caught infringing guild regulations. Civic authorities recognised that offering women the means to maintain themselves, even if illegally, could be more beneficial than having them turn to poor relief. The experiences of marginal, vagrant women are brought to the fore in Brodie’s analysis of the vagrancy laws in sixteenth-century England. Legal and civic records document poignant evidence of the harsh material reality of female beggars’ existence and the strategies civic officials mustered to find them employment, often as domestic servants, to license them as beggars, or to expel them from town.

The contributors to Women and Work have effectively taken up the challenge to explore the experiences of premodern women’s work using the women themselves as the point of departure for their analyses, rather than committing a priori to historiographical narratives in which masculine experience and structures are the norm.

Relationships

Understanding the relationships women formed with other women and with men is central to interpreting working experiences and offers a more complete picture of women’s working lives. Contributors to this volume examine how women interacted with other women and men in diverse working circumstances.

Women participated in overlapping networks reflecting their multiple roles within the household, family, and work; analysis of how women utilised and participated in these networks reveals considerably more interdependence than has often been assumed. Scholars are increasingly sensitive to the idea that patriarchy is not unifying or univocal but allowed considerable scope for certain women to manoeuvre within certain parameters. A common thread to emerge from recent research is that women were not excluded from the workforce per se, but from positions of authority. Contributors to this volume assess the levels of authority women could make for themselves in flexible and imaginative ways: why were some women supported in positions of authority and in what circumstances? Here, authors focus on collaboration, interdependence, and mutual dependency. Such themes are pervasive irrespective of whether the context is economic, as in the chapters by Burns, Goldberg, Schmidt, and Montenach; legal, as in Brodie’s chapter; or literary or spiritual, as in the studies by Hotchin, Jeske, and Thorington. As Wiesner also pointed out in her landmark study, men in positions of traditional civic and economic power were aware of the economic value, status, political and theoretical implications of women’s work and the benefits that accrued from it, as were many women.⁶⁴

The interdependent nature of women’s social, emotional, and economic activities is brought to the fore in Goldberg’s analysis of the sociable work required of late medieval English mercantile and artisanal wives. He draws on the concept of ‘kinship’ work to describe how the active cultivation of a household’s kinship ties for the benefit of family and business was understood as the work of wives. Mercantile and artisanal households could acquire multiple benefits through women’s social ties. Servants were often kin but could also be identified and employed through familial, trade, or business associations. Women’s sociable contacts with family members and in their local neighbourhoods, as well as those developed through their own business ventures, could also prove financially productive in generating custom for business or in developing trusted relations that could lead to essential access to credit. Kinship work, therefore, Goldberg concludes, may have proven vital to the success of the household economy.

Women also functioned as intermediaries in local, urban networks of work, whether legal, informal, or illegal.⁶⁵ Montenach highlights how women’s networks in the textile trade in eighteenth-century Lyon, created and maintained through acquaintance and word of mouth, were instrumental in enabling women to develop underground networks of women and men through which to distribute stolen silk thread. She shows how women’s familiar knowledge of urban spaces, neighbourhoods, and their inhabitants proved vital to opening opportunities for women traders and the men and women who supplied them to foster the illegal trade in silk in Lyon. Women, sometimes wives of cloth merchants or poorer women, also acted as intermediaries to smuggle calico, utilising local and international networks of trade contacts to extend their reach. Successful networks to sustain these illegal activities depended, like their sanctioned household counterparts, on developing confidence and trust.

Women’s relations of patronage and clientage could also be crucial in opening opportunities for work. Christine de Pizan, although unusual as a woman who supported her family through her writing and who secured royal patronage, offers an illustrative example of how familial relations and royal patronage enabled her to establish and manage a successful business after the death of her husband. Thorington outlines the development of the patronage relations between Christine and Queen Ysabel, seeing in their interactions a reciprocal working relationship. The queen promoted Christine’s authorial work, lending it legitimacy and creating opportunities for financial reward, and Christine performed an advisory or counselling role for the queen, for the ‘betterment of France’, through her writing. Jeske’s analysis of twelfth-century women’s epistolary practices also illustrates women’s ability to negotiate patronage networks to create and promote their cultural agency, demonstrating how letters both enacted and recorded the work of sociability through familial and patronal relations to influence literary and artistic commissions.

Women working together in similar occupations, whether through choice, proximity, or economic necessity, could also forge strong bonds of solidarity through which they promoted common interests. Montenach detects a culture of solidarity among economically precarious single women in particular in eighteenth-century Lyon. On occasion when women who traded in stolen silk threads were sought by authorities, the woman’s neighbours and friends banded together to offer protection, claiming to authorities that they had no knowledge of her whereabouts. Brodie offers evidence that women in parish communities in sixteenth-century England worked together to raise money for charitable causes. Schmidt also examines how artisanal widows in Dutch cities banded together, on occasion with men, to petition civic governors to protect their right to manage their workshops. Such examples of women acting jointly to pursue common business interests invite questions about how they knew one another, how they prepared and prosecuted their petitions, the level of support and assistance provided by male counterparts, and also their evident self-understanding as female members of a professional occupation. These are valuable examples attesting to how women collaboratively deployed information and professional knowhow to pursue their goals.

Investigation into the interactions between women and men in this volume reinforce that these relations were multi-layered and more complex than familiar assumptions about gender and work often allow. Schmidt explores elements of collaboration in her discussion of the delicate balance between the rights of a widow to operate her workshop and the qualified journeyman on whom she relied to operate her business. The term she uses, ‘mutual dependency’, draws attention to the relational dimension of the circumstances shaping women’s work by stressing the intersection of women’s working experiences with those of men and other women. The concept of ‘mutual dependency’ can be productive as it underlines the relational and gendered nature of power inherent in women’s working interactions. Schmidt and Montenach also illustrate how guild structures regulating work could operate to exclude women, but that in practice men recognised their value or contribution in some circumstances and showed flexibility to accommodate or promote female activities when they did not impinge on their own aims. The willingness of male officials to support women’s activities as a going concern when their interests intersected is an important reminder that decisions affecting women could also be shaped by pragmatism rather than by gender ideology alone.

Cultural representation

A goal of the collection is to develop an encompassing view of work. Whereas experiences and relationships speak to the historical experience of working women, cultural representations of work alert us to the multiple ways in which societies employ images of work—visually or in text— to convey norms, expectations, and values about social and moral order.⁶⁶ As Gehard Jaritz puts it, visual representations of work convey a particular social group’s values of ‘the right work done by the right people at the right place and the right time and in the right way.’⁶⁷ Although depictions of people at work often contain the ‘reality effect’ through their finely detailed representation, images of work are never merely descriptive or intended to portray labour in isolation from other cultural meanings and values. Visual and literary sources of female work can offer valuable insights into how women’s labour is perceived, although their representative value as interpretations of women’s working experience needs to be carefully weighed. Contributors to this volume, notably Burns, Jeske, Randles, and Goldberg, engage with visual and literary representations of work in multiple ways, teasing out how particular images of women’s work articulate gendered norms about women’s role and place within premodern societies and suggesting how women may have negotiated these expectations in practice.

These themes are brought to the fore in a compelling way in the imagery of a woman spinning with distaff and spindle. This represents the archetypal premodern image of women’s work through which a multiplicity of cultural values about social order, gender relations, and the essential nature of womanhood were expressed. The fourteenth-century proverb ‘When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?’, with which Randles opens her chapter has a long history in mediating ideas about late medieval social relations. Moreover, as Catherine Batt has argued, this phrase also crystallises women’s role as spinners, through which Eve and her distaff function primarily to affirm Adam as the tiller of the soil.⁶⁸ Depictions of Eve or the Virgin spinning such as those discussed by Randles conveyed ideals of medieval womanhood and raise questions about the relationship between image and material practice, and how we are to interpret its meaning. The iconography of producing textiles ignores the material circumstances in which this activity was performed by historical women and, as Randles demonstrates, men as well. Her analysis of textile trades in medieval Europe offers striking evidence of the extent of men’s involvement while also illustrating how activities in textile production were gendered. She concludes that looking at representations of textile production in any single medium tends to distort the way in which it was gendered, and that therefore an interdisciplinary approach that looks at different media and the circumstances in which the representation was produced gives a more accurate picture.

Goldberg is similarly attentive to the relation between representation and historical practice; he employs a variety of literary texts that suggest the nature and scale of a late-medieval bourgeois housewife’s role and responsibilities. As he observes, texts such as conduct literature do not offer a simple reading of social practice; however when read against other documentary evidence they can suggest a cultural expectation about the activities a housewife was expected and required to perform and in what manner.

The depiction of two elaborately attired women labouring at a construction site on the cover of this volume itself offers a striking example of the interplay of meanings between material and immaterial labour, and physical and intellectual work, which lies at the heart of this collection. The two women on the right are shown constructing the foundations of a building depicting the allegorical opening of Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies.⁶⁹ Christine describes how, at a moment when she felt overcome with grief and frustration at the ceaseless literary critique of women, she sees in a vision the figures of three female virtues, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who offer to assist her to construct a city of virtuous women. In the illumination, the composition of which Christine oversaw herself between around 1410 and 1414, the author is depicted with Reason labouring to build the foundations of the city. Reason carries a heavy building stone to Christine, who, with her trowel, applies mortar to set the stone of the foundation in place. This image is positioned alongside a depiction of Christine in her study with the three Virtues, thus visually juxtaposing the two working roles that she performs through her text. She further develops the symbolic parallels between writing and building in the City. Reason instructs Christine to build the city in a ‘field of letters’; later, Rectitude tells her to ‘mix mortar in her ink bottle’, thus likening the work of establishing the foundations of the city to the physical and intellectual effort involved in writing.⁷⁰

As Thorington observes in her chapter in this volume, Christine frequently employed images of building tools as metaphors for her intellectual labour and the manual effort of composition. A woman engaged in construction is in itself a compelling image, especially in contrast to the more customary depictions of women in domestic settings. Whilst historical women are recorded as having been employed in aspects of the premodern construction industry,⁷¹ Christine’s richly attired women are clearly meant to invite the viewer’s identification with the values and gendered expectations assumed to be held by the elite female audience of this manuscript. Representations of women’s labour in the City of Ladies are not static or passive, but when interpreted in conjunction with the text invite the reader/viewer to imitate and enact the work depicted in a similar process of spiritual, moral, and intellectual endeavour within their selves. Christine’s aim is to offer her labour as a model to her reader/viewer, and thus to encourage her audience to exert similar physical and intellectual effort to craft a virtuous self fit to enter the City.⁷² More broadly, Christine’s use of allegorical parallels to equate writing with construction tools shows her familiarity with a rhetorical tradition in which manual labour was used to describe intellectual endeavours, a tradition which culminated in Erasmus’ comparison of his humanist work with the labours of Hercules.⁷³

Jeske’s analysis of women’s letters about love and intimate relationships further illustrates opportunities through which women reshaped classical tradition to assert a distinctly female perspective on the philosophical work involved in moral and ethical self-fashioning. The traditions of friendship and love evinced in these letters were based on classical ideals which articulated a predominantly male rhetoric and practice of friendship. Jeske’s analysis shows how women adapted forms of discourse on friendship and intimate relations to offer an alternate ethical model about how to negotiate relationships. Women’s epistolary exchanges presented an opportunity for some women to participate in and challenge dominant cultural ideas about women’s role in courtly relations, while at the same time enabling these women to articulate and perform literate, courtly identities.

Songs, such as those represented in Old French chansons de toile, offered women another opportunity to speak of their experiences. It was through the act of singing that poetic women created sanctioned space in which to voice laments as a challenge to dominant culture. Burns shows how singing is intertwined with sewing in the chansons de toile, the labour of sewing producing a creative and representational space in which women voice experience of, and imaginatively enact, the possibility of finding success in love, while negotiating their experiences and hopes for loving relationships. In singing of love, these women created identities as active and desiring subjects, in contrast to the customary portrayal of women in courtly romance as passive objects of desire. Lower-status female cloth workers, elite letter writers, and Christine’s elite readers are thus represented or represent themselves as active subjects who adopt and adapt literary and intellectual traditions.

Where to from here?

Women and Work does not claim to be comprehensive in its coverage of the topic across the premodern period; the diversity of women’s lives and circumstances is simply too great to cover in a single volume. The volume, however, is intended to stimulate research into aspects of women’s activity that are not included, such as medicine and health care, science, and the experiences of work for non-Christian as well as non-Western women in the premodern world. Given the trajectory of the current scholarship and the ongoing interest in exploring expanded notions of historical work, research into women and work will continue to broaden our understanding of women’s participation in all domains of endeavour.

One of the goals of this volume is to bring the experiences of individual and collective groups of women to light by giving full credibility to the diversity of premodern women’s experiences of work and, where possible, to highlight the nature of these women’s working relationships with both men and other women. To this end, the authors explore how these experiences and relationships could be represented through various cultural forms. Moreover, by adopting an inclusive approach, the chapters situate those activities performed by women within a flexible framework that accommodates culturally diverse understandings of work. By considering the intellectual, devotional, domestic, and cultural work performed by women, as well as their economic work, the volume poses new questions of premodern sources and historical subjects in connection with ideas about work.

The earlier scholarship on women’s work was trailblazing in that it argued for women’s presence in the economy and as labourers. Thanks to these studies, and those that followed in a similar vein, we now know much more about the sheer scope of activities in which women engaged. Today this point is assumed; women have been demonstrated to be active across numerous industries and in diverse roles. We continue the spirit of the pre-existing scholarship of Hanawalt, Charles and Duffin, and others by expanding the concept of what work could entail and examining women’s roles in working activities from a broader conceptual perspective, using various methodologies from within history and literary studies, and drawing on diverse sources. The questions historians must now turn to challenge different sets of assumptions about the value of cultural and intellectual labour, creating new opportunities to understand women’s history more broadly. Indeed, while we no longer need to press home the point that women worked in the economy or for economic gain, we still have much to do to uncover the varied circumstances in which women did so, how they negotiated the circumstances they faced in terms of constraints of gender and class and age. Women and Work contributes to this wider picture. Our collective endeavour as historians is now to engage with new ways to identify and interpret women’s ‘work’ in the economy, society, and culture.

Notes

1Elizabeth Clinton, The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1622), B1.

2Kate McPherson, introduction to The Countess of Lincolnes Nurserie, An Electronic Edition, by Elizabeth Knevet Clinton, xvi, Emory Women Writers Resource Project. Accessed August 17, 2017. http://womenwriters.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/essay.php?level=div&id=clinton_000.

3Dhuoda, Handbook for her Warrior Son: Liber Manualis, ed. and trans. Marcelle Thiebaux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Charity Cannon Willard, ‘Christine de Pizan as Teacher’, Romance Languages Annual 3 (1992); and Ellen Thorington’s chapter in this volume.

4The term premodern has been adopted within economic, religious, and social histories of Europe, usually to explore extensive periods. See for instance Paolo Malanima, Pre-Modern European Economy: One Thousand Years 10th–19th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler and Marvin Döbler, eds., Religious Education in Pre-Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Beat Kümin, The Communal Age in Western Europe, c. 1100–1800: Towns, Villages and Parishes in Pre-Modern Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Premodern is also used in some literature as an alternative to early modern.

5Diana Robin examines a broad sweep of women writers in Europe spanning the period 1400–1700 in ‘Intellectual Women in Early Modern Europe’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine McIver (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

6The concept of the family economy is re-assessed in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). See also Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xviii; and Janine M. Lanza, ‘Women and Work’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender, ed. Poska, Couchman, and McIver.

7Deborah Simonton presents a lucid overview of the categories of ‘work’, ‘women’, and how both are gendered by social values in her A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), 1–9.

8Reconceiving and extending concepts of what constitutes ‘work’ is an explicit aim of the international, multi-disciplinary research network ‘Producing Change: Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe’ based at the University of Glasgow. Accessed August 7, 2017. http://producingchange.gla.ac.uk. See also The Cultural History of Work, ed. Anne Montenach and Deborah Simonton (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) which offers a comprehensive survey of the social and cultural construction of work across six historical periods. The approach to focus on the cultural history of work provides an opportunity to explore the dynamics of work and the people and relationships involved in working and the workplace, helping to rethink boundaries and the issues of work.

9Bonnie G. Smith, ‘Afterword’, in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Hafter and Kushner, 226.

10Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Rosemarie Fiebranz, et al., ‘Making Verbs Count: The Research Project “Gender and Work” and its Methodology’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 59 (2011).

11Fiebranz, et al. ‘Making Verbs’, 280.

12Our thanks to Anne Laurence for helpful discussions about this.

13Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner, ‘Introduction’, in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Hafter and Kushner, 10.

14Andromache Karanika, Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

15Kimberly A. LoPrete, ‘Women, Gender and Lordship in France, c. 1050–1250’, History Compass 5 (2007); and Rafe Blaufarb, ‘The Phenomenon of Female Lordship: The Example of the Comtesse de Sade’, in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Hafter and Kushner.

16Josef Ehmer briefly surveys how the concepts of work and labour interact with charity and unemployment in early modern Germany in ‘Discourses on Work and Labour in 15th and 16th-Century Germany’, in Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, ed. Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 27–30.

17Jürgen Kocka, ‘Work as a Problem in European History’, in Work in a Modern Society, ed. Kocka, 1.

18Kocka, ‘Work as a Problem’, and Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis, eds., The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

19Kocka, ‘Work as a Problem’, 2.

20Michael Uebel and Kellie Robertson, ‘Conceptualizing Labor in the Middle Ages’, in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 4; Kocka, ‘Work as a Problem’, 2. Using the term ‘immaterial’ to describe work has been critiqued because it elides the embodied dimension of effort involved in physical labour as mentioned here, as well as emotional or caring labour. However, our use of the term is an effective shorthand for distinguishing between work that produced a tangible object and work that did not.

21‘work, n.’, in Oxford English Dictionary online. Accessed March 1, 2017. www.oed.com.

22Cursor Mundi. The Cursur of the World. A Northumbrian Poem of the XIVth Century, In Four Versions, ed. Richard Morris, EETS OS 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1874–1893), 1132, l. 19764; and Gesta Romanorum, in London, British Library, MS Additional 9066, fol. 341r; each cited in the Oxford English Dictionary online entry, ‘work, n.’.

23Uebel and Robertson, ‘Conceptualizing Labor’; Catharina Lis and Josef Ehmer, ‘Introduction: Historical Studies in Perceptions of Work’, in The Idea of Work, ed. Ehmer and Lis.

24Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.2, q. 187, art. 3, cited and discussed in Uebel and Robertson, ‘Conceptualizing Labor’, 4, 14 n. 4; Birgit van den Hoven, Work in Ancient and Medieval Thought: Ancient Philosophers, Medieval Monks and Theologians and their Concept of Work, Occupations and Theology (Leiden: Brill, 1996), esp. ch. 3; John Van Engen, ‘Medieval Monks on Labor and Leisure’, in Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity, ed. Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Jacques le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), xii.

25Kocka, ‘Work as a Problem’, 8; Lis and Ehmer, ‘Perceptions of Work’, 19–20.

26On how oeconomics can be a productive way to understand eighteenth-century British domestic patterns, see Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

27Examples of this approach include Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and more recently Lanza, ‘Women and Work’, and her ‘Labour, Land, Economy’ in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). These contain useful surveys of women in urban and rural economies which adopt a traditional social economic focus; the latter volume also includes surveys of women and slavery that productively extend concepts and interpretations of work.

28Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500–1700. Accessed August 17, 2017. https://earlymodernwomenswork.wordpress.com. Whittle’s definition of work is based on the ‘third party criterion’ developed by the economist Margaret Reid, The Economics of Household Production (New York: Wiley, 1934), who sought to account properly for work undertaken within the household.

29Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Women’s Labors: Reproduction and Sex Work in Medieval Europe’, Journal of Women’s History 15 (2004).

30Selected studies include Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Marjorie K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, ed. Marilyn Stone and Caren Benito-Vessels (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); and Ogilvie, Bitter Living.

31Harvey, Little Republic, 25.

32Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Joanna Picciotto, ‘Devotion and Intellectual Labour’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44 (2014); and the special issue on ‘Intellectual Labor’, ed. Keya Ganguly in the South Atlantic Quarterly 108 (2009).

33Patrick Joyce, ‘The Historical Meanings of Work: An Introduction’, in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

34Karras, ‘Women’s Labors’.

35Kocka, ‘Work as a Problem’. Karras, ‘Women’s Labors’, 155, adopts a similarly broad concept of work defined as what someone spends her life doing, and what others take to be the main contribution she makes, in relation to women’s reproductive work, although the definition has broader application too.

36Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London: Croon Helm, 1985); and Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. David Herlihy’s Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), was similarly foundational. For historiographical reviews of this field, see Judith M. Bennett, ‘Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide’, in Culture and History, 1350–1699: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 147–75; Pamela Sharpe, ‘Continuity and Change: Women’s History and Economic History in Britain’, Economic History Review 48 (1995): 353–69; and Lanza, ‘Women and Work’.

37Darlene Abreu-Ferreira has published widely on women and work in Portugal, including ‘Fishmongers and Shipowners: Women in Maritime Communities of Early Modern Portugal’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000); ‘From Mere Survival to Near Success: Women’s Economic Strategies in Early Modern Portugal’, Journal of Women’s History 13 (2001); and ‘Work and Identity in Early Modern Portugal: What Did Gender Have to Do With It?’, Journal of Social History 35 (2002). For Spain, see Stone and Benito-Vessels, eds., Women at Work in Spain; and Ana Rich Abad, ‘“Able and Available”: Jewish Women in Medieval Barcelona and their Economic Activities’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6 (2014). For the Mediterranean, see Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice; Dora Dumont, ‘Women and Guilds in Bologna: The Ambiguities of “Marginality”’, Radical History Review 70 (1998); and Raffaella Sarti, ‘Notes on the Feminization of Domestic Service: Bologna as a Case Study’, Acta demographica 13 (1997). See also Grethe Jacobsen, ‘Women’s Work and Women’s Role: Ideology and Reality in Danish Urban Society, 1300–1550’, The Scandinavian Economic History Review 30 (1983); Brit Berggren, ‘The Female Peasant and the Male Peasant: Division of Labour in Traditional Norway’, Ethnologia Scandinavica 14 (1984); and Josef Ehmer, ‘Rural Guilds and Urban-Rural Guild Relations in Early Modern Central Europe’, in The Return of the Guilds, ed. Jan Lucassen, Tine De Moor, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, special issue of International Review of Social History 53, suppl. 16 (2008): 143–58.

38See also chapters by Goldberg, Schmidt, and Thorington in this volume. Schmidt’s chapter stems from the Dutch project she led on ‘Women’s Work in the Early Modern Northern Netherlands, c. 1600–1815’ funded by the Friends of the IISH, the Stichting Van Winterfonds, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

39Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy; and Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986) and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

40Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katharine A. McIver, ‘Introduction’, in Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender, ed. Poska, Couchman, and McIver, 8.

41Theresa Earenfight, ‘Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens and the Idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Europe’, Gender & History 19 (2007), and The King’s Other Body: María of Castile and the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Therese Martin, ‘Exceptions and Assumptions: Women in Medieval Art History’, in Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Therese Martin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1:1–33, and ‘The Margin to Act: A Framework for Investigation of Women’s (and Men’s) Medieval Art-Making’, Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016).

42Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Kimberly A. LoPrete, Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord (c. 1067–1137) (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007); Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin, Partners in Spirit: Women, Men and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

43Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) and the articles in the special issue on ‘Beyond Women and Power: Looking Backward and Moving Forward’, in the Medieval Feminist Forum 51 (2015).

44Lanza, ‘Women and Work’, 280.

45Judith M. Bennett, ‘Confronting Continuity’, Journal of Women’s History 9 (1997).

46Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Do Women Need the Renaissance?’, Gender & History, 20 (2008).

47The ‘Golden Age’ debate about whether women experienced economic improvements following the Black Death followed by their erosion in the sixteenth century is one of the most arresting examples of the desire to track clear trajectories of change. Subsequent debate has questioned whether post-plague conditions materially affected women’s opportunities for the better. Some, like Marjorie McIntosh, have found evidence of certain improved conditions but without going so far as to argue for a ‘golden age’. See Caroline Barron, ‘The “Golden Age” of Women in Medieval London’, Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989); McIntosh, Working Women.

48Bennett, ‘Confronting Continuity’, 82. Bennett reiterates these arguments in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenges of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and ‘Forgetting the Past’, Gender & History 20 (2008).

49Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters; McIntosh, Working Women.

50Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy.

51Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany.

52Janine M. Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007); Micheline White, ed., English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).

53Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work. See also James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Charles and Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England; L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘Occupational Structure and the Escape from Malthusian Constraints in England and Wales, 1381–1911’, in Population Histories in Context, ed. R.M. Smith and E.A. Wrigley (forthcoming); Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History 75 (2015).

54Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. Michael DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

55For surveys of women’s economic opportunities that extend beyond geographic scope of this volume, see Kathryn Reyerson, ‘Urban Economies’, in Handbook of Women and Gender, ed. Bennett and Karras, 299–301.

56Joanna H. Drell, ‘Aristocratic Economies: Women and Family’, in Handbook of Women and Gender, ed. Bennett and Karras.

57The literature on religious women is vast; studies that address women as monastic leaders and how nuns negotiated their economic, legal, and political interests include Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Valerie G. Spear, Leadership in Medieval English Nunneries (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005).

58Lanza, ‘Women and Work’; Anne Montenach and Deborah Simonton ‘Gender, Agency and Economy: Shaping the Eighteenth-Century European Town’, in Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830, ed. Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (New York: Routledge, 2013).

59Lanza, ‘Women and Work’, and Schmidt’s chapter in this volume.

60Montenach and Simonton, ‘Afterword’, in Female Agency in the Urban Economy, ed. Simonton and Montenach, 244.

61Jane Whittle, ‘Rural Economies’, in Handbook of Women and Gender, ed. Bennett and Karras, 321, drawing upon Bennett, History Matters, and Sandy Bardsley, ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present 165 (1999).

62Whittle, ‘Rural Economies’, 322.

63Sharon Farmer presents a detailed social and economic study of Parisian silk workers in The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

64Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany.

65Montenach and Simonton, ‘Gender, Agency and Economy’, 10.

66Gerhard Jaritz, ‘The Visual Representation of Late Medieval Work: Patterns of Context, People and Action’, and Peter Burke, ‘Representing Women’s Work in Early Modern Italy’, both in The Idea of Work, ed. Ehmer and Lis; Geraldine Sheridan, Louder than Words: Ways of Seeing Women Workers in Eighteenth-Century France (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009).

67Jaritz, ‘Visual Representation of Late Medieval Work’, 135; italics in original.

68Catherine Batt, ‘The Idioms of Women’s Work and Thomas Hoccleve’s Travails’, in The Middle Ages at Work, ed. Uebel and Robertson, 20. For an overview of the range of symbolic, moral, and cultural values associated with the iconography of spinning in early-modern Dutch culture, see Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, ‘Visualizing Women’s Work in the Textile Trades at the Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age’, in Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past, ed. Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 49–50; and Randles’ chapter in this volume.

69London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 292r; Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl J. Richards with a foreword by Marina Warner (New York: Persea Books, 1982).

70Sandra L. Hindman, ‘With Ink and Mortar: Christine de Pisan’s Cité des Dames (an Art Essay)’, Feminist Studies 10 (1984).

71Shelley E. Roff, ‘“Appropriate to her Sex”?: Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, in Women and Wealth in Medieval Europe, ed. Theresa Earenfight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

72A strikingly similar image of women laboring at building, with similar moral and didactic intent, is the depiction of nuns in British Library, Stowe MS 39, illustrating the spiritual treatise ‘Abbey of the Holy Ghost’. Boyda Johnstone, ‘Reading Images, Drawing Texts: The Illustrated Abbey of the Holy Ghost in British Library MS Stowe 39’, in Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

73Picciotto, ‘Devotion and Intellectual Labor’, 7.

Select bibliography

Bardsley, Sandy. ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’. Past and Present 165 (1999): 3–29.

Barron, Caroline. ‘The “Golden Age” of Women in Medieval London’. Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989): 35–58.

Bennett, Judith M. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenges of Feminism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

——— ‘Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide’. In Culture and History, 1350–1699: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, edited by David Aers, 147–75. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Bennett, Judith M., and Ruth Mazo Karras, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Charles, Lindsey, and Lorna Duffin, eds. Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England. London: Croon Helm, 1985.

Fiebranz, Rosemarie, Erik Lindberg, Jonas Lindström, and Maria Ågren. ‘Making Verbs Count: The Research Project “Gender and Work” and its Methodology’. Scandinavian Economic History Review 59 (2011): 273–93.

Hafter, Daryl M., and Nina Kushner, eds. Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015.

Hanawalt, Barbara A., ed. Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Herlihy, David. Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.

Howell, Martha C. Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Humphries, Jane, and Jacob Weisdorf. ‘The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’. Journal of Economic History 75 (2015): 405–47.

Joyce, Patrick. ‘The Historical Meanings of Work: An Introduction’. In The Historical Meanings of Work, edited by Patrick Joyce, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Women’s Labors: Reproduction and Sex Work in Medieval Europe’. Journal of Women’s History 15 (2004): 153–58.

Kocka, Jürgen, ed. Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2010.

Lanza, Janine M. From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.

McIntosh, Marjorie K. Working Women in English Society, 1300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Ogilvie, Sheilagh. A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Poska, Allyson, Jane Couchman, and Katherine McIver, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Shepard, Alexandra, and Garthine Walker. ‘Gender, Change and Periodisation’. Gender & History 20 (2008): 453–62.

Simonton, Deborah. A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present. London: Routledge, 1998.

Uebel, Michael, and Kellie Robertson, eds. The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

Whittle, Jane. ‘Rural Economies’. In The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, 311–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Wiesner, Merry E. Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. ‘Do Women Need the Renaissance?’. Gender & History 20 (2008): 539–57.

———. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.