Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent (New Middle Ages)

T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Presence and Presentation:Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition edited by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise:The Voice of a TwelfthCentury Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower Robes and Honor:The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter:The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr.

The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges

Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd i

2/9/2011 12:37:52 PM

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren

The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick

Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects,Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd ii

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers

Medieval Fabrications: Dress,Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady

Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?:The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson

Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500:Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Logic,Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille:Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney

Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft

Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina

On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder

Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura

Writers of the Reign of Henry II:Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

Lonesome Words:The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song by M.G. McGeachy

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman

Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley

Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages by Noah D. Guynn

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd iii

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges edited by María Bullón-Fernández The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process by Albrecht Classen Claustrophilia:The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature by Cary Howie Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton

Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality by Louise M. Sylvester Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Jeremy Goldberg Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature by Tison Pugh Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-Century Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor by Louise M. Haywood The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner Battlefronts Real and Imagined:War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz

In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past edited by Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, foreword by Giles Tremlett

The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson

Chaucerian Aesthetics by Peggy A. Knapp

Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen

Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama by Theodore K. Lerud

Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition,Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics by Susan Signe Morrison

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd iv

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Seeta Chaganti The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77-1445) by Albrecht Classen Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes by J. Allan Mitchell Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature by Kathleen E. Kennedy The Post-Historical Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition by Geoffrey W. Gust Queens in Stone and Silver:The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France by Kathleen Nolan Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers Berenguela of Castile (1180-1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Miriam Shadis

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd v

Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer by Mary Catherine Davidson The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of Their Complete Correspondence and Related Writings translated and edited by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe edited by Theresa Earenfight Visual Power and Fame in René d’Anjou, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Black Prince by SunHee Kim Gertz Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media by Brantley L. Bryant Margaret Paston’s Piety by Joel T. Rosenthal Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis by Theresa Tinkle Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature by Roger A. Ladd Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music edited by C. Stephen Jaeger Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective:Translations of the Sacred edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Jennifer Jahner Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond edited by Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso Outlawry in Medieval Literature by Timothy S. Jones Women and Disability in Medieval Literature by Tory Vandeventer Pearman The Lesbian Premodern edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent,Virtually Present by Miriamne Ara Krummel

Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent by Shennan Hutton

Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century Quest (forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd vi

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

WOMEN AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES IN LATE MEDIEVAL GHENT Shennan Hutton

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd vii

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

WOMEN AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES IN LATE MEDIEVAL GHENT

Copyright © Shennan Hutton, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10495–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hutton, Shennan, 1955– Women and economic activities in late medieval Ghent / Shennan Hutton. p. cm.—(New Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–10495–2 1. Women—Belgium—Ghent—History—To 1500. 2. Women— Belgium—Ghent—Economic conditions. 3. Women—Belgium—Ghent— Social conditions. 4. Ghent (Belgium)—Economic conditions. 5. Ghent (Belgium)—Social conditions. I. Title. HQ1147.B4H88 2011 305.48⬘9620949314209023—dc22

2010036771

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd viii

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction 1 The Urban Context 2 Activity and Continuity: Patterns of Women’s Economic Participation 3 “Her and All Her Property”: Gender and Property Transactions 4 Webs of Credit and Circulation of Wealth 5 Married Partners and Single Women as Producers and Sellers 6 The Changing Fortunes of the Burgher and Patrimonial Constructions Conclusion

1 17

123 143

Notes

155

Select Bibliography

207

Index

227

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd ix

35 59 81 103

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd x

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

ILLUSTRATIONS

Images Map of Ghent in the Fifteenth Century Untitled Miniature of a Fight on the Friday Market Square

xvi 17

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 6.1 6.2

Gender and Activity Status in Economic Acts Social Status of Women Who Acted in Their Own Names Acts by Gender and Activity Level for Each Annual Register Marital Status of Women Acting in Their Own Names Gender and Activity Status in Sales Contracts Gender and Activity Status in Property Lawsuits Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names in Lawsuits Gender and Activity Status in Acts by Property Market Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names by Property Market Simon de Mirabello van Halen and Family Credit Acts by Gender and Activity Status Roles of Women in Their Own Names in Credit Acts Creditors and Debtors by Marital Status Comparison of Loans of Singlewomen, Widows, and Men Comparison of Gender Relationships in Debt-Related Acts Gender and Activity Status in Acts from 1420–21 Annual Register Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names, 1420–21

42 47 48 49 63 64 65 67 68 72 87 88 89 91 98 127 129

Tables 4.1 Comparative Sizes of Men’s and Women’s Loans 6.1 Gender and Activity Compared between 1360–61 and 1420–21 6.2 Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names Compared

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd xi

88 128 129

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd xii

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

t is my pleasure to acknowledge the assistance, advice, and support I have received in the research and writing of this book and the dissertation that was its original form. I was fortunate enough to receive a Fulbright grant to Belgium to conduct nine months of research in the city archives, as well as travel grants from the University of California, Davis. The director, Leen Charles, and Valerie Meillander and the staff of the Stadsarchief Gent (City Archives of Ghent) went out of their way to be helpful and friendly to me in my long sojourn in this fabulous archive. I am grateful to the director and staff of the Rijksarchief Gent (State Archive of Ghent). I want to thank Marc Boone, Thérèse De Hemptinne, Peter Stabel, Monique van Melkebeek, Erik Thoen, and the members of the Vakgroep Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis (Medieval History Department) at Ghent University for welcoming me into their midst and offering me tremendous support, as well as for setting the highest standards of scholarship. The guidance, critiques, and patience of Marc Boone, Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, and Katrien Heene were absolutely essential. I wish to thank my Dutch tutors Marjolein D’Arcy and Frida Tindall. I have had valuable guidance, advice, and criticism from Joan Cadden, Sally McKee, Deborah Harkness, and Sharon Farmer. Joan Cadden was an exceptionally fine mentor and a model of the very finest the history profession offers to the world. For their advice and assistance in preparing this book, I thank Michele Clouse, Celeste Chamberlain, Jelle Haemers, Erika Quinn, Martha Howell, Tanya Stabler, Frederik Buylaert, and Jim Murray. Lastly, I want to thank my friends and family for supporting and tolerating me during this academic journey. A special thanks to my mother, Virginia Danford, for her enthusiastic support, and especially to my husband, Darrell Hutton, who had to put up with so much and did so with such grace and humor.

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd xiii

2/9/2011 12:37:53 PM

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd xiv

2/9/2011 12:37:54 PM

ABBREVIATIONS

AGN Coutume Gand

RAG Rekeningen

SAG SAG, 301, 1

SAG, 330, 1

Stadsrekeningen

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd xv

Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden Coutume de la ville de Gand. Coutumes des pays et comté du Flandre. Quartier de Gand, edited by A. E. Gheldolf, A. Du Bois, and L. De Hondt (Custom of the City of Ghent) Rijksarchief Gent (State Archives of Ghent) De Rekeningen der Stad Gent. Tijdvak van Jacob van Artevelde 1339–1349, edited by Napoleon De Pauw and Julius Vuylsteke (Ghent City Accounts from 1339–1349) Stadsarchief Gent (City Archive of Ghent) Schepenen van de Keure. Jaarregisters. Stadsarchief Gent (Aldermen of the Keure. Annual Registers. City Archive of Ghent), Series 301, no. 1. Schepenen van de Gedele. Jaarregisters. Stadsarchief Gent (Aldermen of the Gedele. Annual Registers. City Archive of Ghent), Series 330, no. 1 Gentse Stads- en Baljuwsrekeningen (1351–1364), edited by Alfons van Werveke (Ghent City Accounts from 1351–1364)

2/9/2011 12:37:54 PM

Groenen Brief Augustinians

s

lite

r Ca

me

M

un

t

Gravensteen

Vrijdagmarkt St Jacob

kt

Vi

Koornmarkt St Niklaas

Franciscans

Leie

BIJLOKE

g

bru

uw

Nie

Belfry

traa t

St Jan Veld s

Dominicans

St Michiel

Town Hoo gpo Hall or t

Overschelde

Kouter Keteigracht

Walpoort

Sch eldt

poort

Braampoort

Vl

ee

sm

ar

sh

ui

s

La ng e

St Veerle

Map of Ghent in the Fifteenth Century. Taken from Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent, 43. Courtesy of Peter Arnade, Marc Boone and Cornell University Press

9780230104952_01_prexvi.indd xvi

2/9/2011 12:37:54 PM

INTRODUCTION

O

n October 16, 1349, Lievin van Ansbeke and Kateline Minnemans appeared before the aldermen in the Flemish city of Ghent to register the following debt contract: Be it known that Lievin van Ansbeke has come before the aldermen of the Keure in Ghent, Sir Symoen Metten Scapen and Sir Jan de Pape, and declared that he [Lievin] owes Kateline Minnemans ten pounds groot, [secured] on himself and all his property whether it lies within Ghent or outside, to pay that at the will and request of Kateline without any longer respite. Done in the aldermanry of Gillis Rijnvisch and his associates on the sixteenth day of October, anno domini 1349.1

The aldermen of the Keure were the highest governing body in Ghent, which was the second largest city in northern Europe and a prominent and wealthy center of wool cloth production. Selected from the city’s patrician families and the elites of its most powerful guilds, the aldermen of the Keure promulgated ordinances, authorized and sealed private contracts, and adjudicated disputes for city burghers and residents of the hinterland. In contrast, Lievin van Ansbeke and Kateline Minnemans were not important historical figures, nor were they members of the city’s elite. However, the ten pounds groot Lievin owed Kateline was quite a large amount of money, enough to support an orphan from the urban elite for five years.2 Like thousands of other people who appeared before the aldermen to have their contracts approved, sealed, and copied into the annual registers, Lievin and Kateline were prosperous enough to pay for the recording of their most important financial agreements. Although this act does not relate why Lievin owed Kateline the money, more is revealed about the two in acts from 1353 and 1357. By 1353, Lievin and Kateline were married to each other, and together they swore that they owed seventeen pounds groot to Steven Puls. They promised “each of them for everything, on themselves and all their property” to repay the debt. 3 They were unable to do so. In 1357, their surety (or

9780230104952_02_int.indd 1

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

2

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

co-signer), Sir Jan Uten Berghe, paid Steven Puls and testified before the aldermen that he had been “damaged by Lievin van Ansbeke and Kateline Minnemans as surety for them for the aforesaid sum.”4 There is no surviving record of the resolution of this case, or any further documentation of the lives of Lievin and Kateline. These terse records from the aldermen’s registers leave many questions unanswered. We do not know when the two married, or why Lievin owed her the first ten pounds, or whether they were ever able to repay their surety. However, the acts do reveal something about how the aldermen and medieval Ghentenars viewed women’s legal and economic roles. In the first act, the clerk identified Kateline Minnemans by her name alone rather than by her marital status or the name of her closest male relative. Even though ten pounds groot was a huge amount of money, no member of her family needed to approve her extension of credit to Lievin van Ansbeke. She was apparently full owner of whatever property backed that credit extension and not subject to the guardianship or supervision of a man from her natal family. The clerk also used identical language, irrespective of gender, to identify Kateline and Lievin. The aldermen and their clerks accepted the legal capability of a woman to make contracts and obligations involving her own property in an entirely noncontroversial, ordinary, and prosaic manner. The legal documents also reveal something about marriage in Ghent. When the clerk identified Kateline as Lieven’s wife, he consistently used the names of the two together throughout the act to emphasize their mutual responsibility for the debt. The clerk wrote that they owed the money “each of them for everything” (elc over al), a legal formula prescribing that each party was liable for the full amount of the debt, and “on themselves and all their property” (up hemlieden ende up al thare), a legal formula obligating all their property. The legal formulas and repetition of both names suggest that Kateline was not merely consenting to Lievin’s actions, but acting as his economic partner. Using the sales contracts, loan contracts, lawsuit adjudications, and other acts from the earliest surviving aldermen’s registers, this study maps the contours of women’s economic activities in Ghent. It begins with the first partial register in 1339 and ends with the institution of a new city government, the Three Members, in 1361, well short of the fifteenth century, which brought dramatic change in women’s economic status. Rather than focusing on change over time, my primary subject is how Ghentenars understood economic gender roles at a given point in time. I examine work, buying, selling and managing property, borrowing and loaning money, and engaging in lawsuits under the wide rubric of “women’s economic activities” to show the entire (recoverable) range

9780230104952_02_int.indd 2

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

3

of women’s efforts. In this assessment, I use statistics and analysis of language to compare the activities of women and men, as well as examining other axes of difference. This study also situates women’s economic activities within the wider political, social, and economic contexts. Women performed economic activities as principals, without male representation or supervision, in one-quarter of the entire collection of more than 1,500 legal acts and contracts recorded in the surviving annual registers from 1339 through 1361. Single, married, and widowed women all managed property, lent and borrowed money, and brought and answered lawsuits before the aldermen. As a result, I argue that in the mid-fourteenth century, Ghent women led relatively continuous economic lives, shaped by their own choices, external circumstances, and negotiation with their husbands, their families, and the aldermen. Although women were personally and socially affected by changes in their life course, their marital status did not determine what economic activities they pursued. Talent, social status, and wealth were much more important factors in determining the range of economic possibilities for a Ghent woman in the mid-fourteenth century. To provide a framework for the discussion of how women’s economic activities fit into this society, I propose to contrast two constructions of women’s economic roles—a patrimonial construction and a burgher construction. Women’s economic activities included property management, work, and credit relationships, and were intermeshed with inheritance customs, marriage practices, family structures, and discourses and beliefs about gender roles. Combining all of these factors into a clear and concise set of terms is useful for discussion. Each construction includes four elements: legal customs, a family system, discourses and beliefs, and the scope of economic activities in actual practice. The patrimonial construction is familiar to medieval scholars as a model for the activities of elite women within a patriarchal society; my choice of “patrimonial” as the descriptor emphasizes the central importance of property ownership and management in these constructions. Patrimonial legal customs (or written laws) limited women’s access to family property (the “patrimony”) to ensure that it would remain in the hands of a single male heir.5 Legal customs also held that when a woman married, she lost legal capability and her husband took over management of her property as well as the household. The patrimonial family system focused on a patrilineage (a line of male ancestors), which marginalized family women and calculated kinship and inheritance agnatically, or through men alone.6 Patrimonial discourses valorized male ancestors, questioned women’s competence in economic matters, and emphasized the importance of male control over households. Men often acted for family women to manage property, and

9780230104952_02_int.indd 3

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

4

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

married women did not perform any legal economic activities without express permission from their husbands, and then only in exceptional circumstances. The patrimonial construction emphasized the husband’s authority over his wife, as “her husband and guardian [man ende voogd]” and male, patrilineal control over property that women owned in the interests of preserving the patrimony for male heirs. Appearing first in Flanders with feudal law and noble rural landholding, the patrimonial construction included a special system of inheritance and marital property customs, as well as landholding practices, along with supporting discourses. As a contrast to this familiar patrimonial construction of women’s roles in economic activities, I propose a “burgher construction.” The term burgher refers to the locus of this work in the city of Ghent and the predominance of this construction in the older and more local practices within the city. Only the phrase “burgher construction” (as an expression collectively denoting legal customs, a family system, beliefs, and economic activities) is truly original, since many features of the burgher construction derive from existing scholarship. Legally, the city of Ghent was governed by custom that was not written down in full until the mid-sixteenth century.7 By that custom, all property, except land held in fief, was equally divisible among all children, without regard to age or sex. Most marital property was held in community, wives retained ownership of some types of land as personal property, and the surviving spouse inherited half of the community property without restrictions.8 The burgher family system calculated kinship networks on both sides of the family and considered both male and female descendants as rightful heirs to family property.9 In the burgher construction, patriarchal norms coexisted with the belief that women were potentially competent managers of property as representatives of their families. Although the burgher construction included the principle that husbands should rule over their wives, it also assumed that married women had the right to be involved in the management of their personal property. This apparent contradiction did not seem to bother Ghentenars, and women’s management of property did not necessarily threaten the patriarchal order as long as the transaction was unimportant. Married women routinely performed legal economic acts without fuss, explanation, or permission clauses.10 Although the burgher and patrimonial constructions shared common beliefs about the importance of family property and male authority, the burgher construction allowed a much wider scope of economic activities to women. Another function of the patrimonial and burgher constructions is that they can be identified by the legal clauses in the brief documents recorded in the aldermen’s registers and then compared and quantified.

9780230104952_02_int.indd 4

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

5

The statistical compilation shows that the majority of the acts in the aldermen’s registers from 1339 through 1361 use the burgher construction, while the patrimonial construction appears in 3 percent of the acts. Thus, in fourteenth-century Ghent, the burgher construction was far more common than the patrimonial construction. However, the fact that the patrimonial construction appears at all shows that the burgher construction was contested. Because historians have shown that women in the cities of the Low Countries lost access to occupations and experienced restrictions on their control of community property and their legal capability in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the evidence—and incidence—of the patrimonial construction in the fourteenth century offers important insights into the change process.11 Along with the burgher and patrimonial constructions, this study analyzes the scope of women’s legal capability and economic activities. There were clear limits around women’s activities, preventing them from holding any positions of political power and excluding them from guild leadership, the international markets, and the most profitable economic pursuits, which indicate that gender was a powerful marker of difference. Nevertheless, some women attained a middling level of prosperity in certain economic niches where they were crucial links in the production and distribution systems of the city. These niches fall into three broad categories: property management (buying, selling, dividing inheritances, pledging, collecting, suing), credit activities (borrowing, lending, suing), and work (laboring for wages, producing, marketselling). Ghent women owned large amounts of property, and legal custom gave women a voice in the management of that property throughout their lives. Some married women chose to claim their right by publicly performing management before the aldermen, others partnered with their husbands, and some ceded their right.12 Women of means had choices, but life circumstances and patriarchal constraints placed considerable pressure on those choices. Husbands and male family members were one source of pressure, but I argue that women’s relations with male family members on property matters were more negotiations than requests for permission. Many elite women invested their considerable wealth, particularly in annuities and moneylending. They managed their own wealth themselves, circulating it through the commercial economy and making it available for capital formation. Women had access to a broad range of activities in the middle rung of the economy in trades such as draping, mercery, and dyeing. Women were not present in great numbers in the top echelons of any economic sector, which were dominated by elite men, but neither were their activities confined to the lowest and most poorly paid rung of the economy.

9780230104952_02_int.indd 5

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

6

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Analysis of the burgher construction of mid-fourteenth-century Ghent provides an example of a society in which women had a wider and more continuous role in the economy than in many other areas of medieval and early modern Europe. However, Ghent is more than just an example of a medieval city; in the 1350s it was the second-largest city in northern Europe. It was the largest center of wool cloth production in the heavily urbanized and commercially developed county of Flanders. Its wealth, political power, and control over the hinterland made it as comparable to the Italian cities of Venice, Genoa, and Florence as it was to London. Besides its own importance as a city, Ghent serves as an example for cities of the Low Countries and for rural and urban regions of continental northwestern Europe, which often do not have surviving records of actual practice from the fourteenth century. Examination of the burgher construction in Ghent reveals that the exact customs and circumstances pertaining in Ghent at this moment in time helped craft the boundaries around the sphere of economic activities open to women. Individual women pushed at those boundaries, enlarging the sphere whenever and wherever they could, and the result was a specific, or particular, burgher construction for mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. However, the Ghent burgher construction was not exceptional. Comparisons among cities (and urban and rural areas) in the wider region of northwestern continental Europe suggest that other particular forms of the burgher construction thrived from Paris to Cologne. Historiographical Issues Scholarship on women in medieval Ghent’s economy has already shown that the patrimonial construction did not dominate in the fourteenthcentury city. Studies of marriage and household in the cities of the Low Countries have outlined many features of what I term the “burgher construction.”13 The most extensive study of women’s economic activities available in English is The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent, by David Nicholas.14 A specialist in the socioeconomic development of Ghent, Nicholas used the evidence from the aldermen’s registers to outline the social and economic position of women, noting the participation of women in a wide array of occupations, from moneychangers to silversmiths to notaries, publicly identified as responsible artisans. His descriptions of women’s work, observations, and vignettes made important contributions to the field. He argued that in Ghent there was an expectation that women should work or bring in income to the household,15 regardless of their marital status. However, he organized his discussion of women and work

9780230104952_02_int.indd 6

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

7

around the argument that all women were under some form of male guardianship, a conclusion that has since been thoroughly discredited.16 Although he does not discuss the Minnemans case specifically, Nicholas’s view was that Kateline Minnemans must have been under guardianship from her father, brother, or other relative in administration of her property, even though the document does not state this. When Lievin and Kateline were listed together, Lievin must have been the important party, while Kateline was subordinate to him. These assumptions came, in part, from the wider historiography about pre-modern women’s legal capability, built on studies of England (as the northern example) and Italy (as the southern example).17 Studies of England had shown that medieval married women were subject to their husbands’ control and were, therefore, legally incapable, unable to conduct business without their husbands’ express consent. Many married women worked at their husbands’ trades as part of the household production system, although married women could become legally independent in the practice of a trade as femmes soles.18 Flemish prescriptive sources (fifteenth-century legal treatises and sixteenth-century redacted customs) include provisions about married women being “covered” by their husbands unless women were “public merchants” [openbare coopwijven] in a strictly separate business.19 Since the restrictions on women in sixteenth-century Flanders and England matched, looking backwards for similarities between the Ghent evidence and the extensive studies of women’s status in England was understandable. Seeing evidence that contradicted not only this paradigm but also Flemish legal historiography for later centuries, Nicholas assumed that male guardianship over women existed behind the scenes. While few historians today would accept his assertion that single and widowed women were subject to guardianship, the assumption that married women were also under coverture in Ghent and other Flemish cities during the fourteenth century is still common.20 In the absence of many gender studies of actual practice in the northern continental cities in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries (due often to lack of sources), many assume that the similarity between the Low Countries (and the rest of the northwestern continent) and England existed earlier as well. 21 Ellen Kittell challenges Nicholas’s position that all women were subject to guardianship, either explicitly stated or implicit.22 Looking at acts from the Ghent aldermen’s register from 1339–50, Kittell reveals that married women, both with and without the presence of their husbands, performed public economic acts before the aldermen. On this basis, Kittell argues that before the Burgundian dukes took over rule of Flanders in 1384, both husbands and wives had “the capacity to manage and to administer marital property.”23 In a study of widows and orphans

9780230104952_02_int.indd 7

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

8

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

in late-fifteenth-century Ghent, Marianne Danneel shows that widows with minor children had to cooperate with guardians appointed by the late father’s family in administration of jointly owned property. However, widowers were also subject to this cooperation with guardians, and there was no further guardianship for widows.24 My re-examination of the sources Nicholas used shows that only a small minority of women were under guardianship, and there is no support for Nicholas’s assumption that “most women had no binding power to make contracts without the consent of a male guardian.”25 Although many of his points remain valid, because Nicholas used guardianship as the organizing principle for his discussion of women’s economic and legal roles, the analytical usefulness of Domestic Life is limited. Ellen Kittell has exposed other important patterns in the status of women in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Low Countries. Her work on thirteenth-century Douai (the other city in the Low Countries with copious early records) highlights the access of women to the majority of the city’s occupations through analysis of gender dyads (masculine and feminine forms of occupational titles in Picard French).26 In the Douai records of actual practice, clerks identified women through a number of social designations, such as citizenship and occupation, in addition to marital status and family.27 Her work on women’s public performance of oral legal acts shows that there was no public space from which women were excluded.28 Beyond these solidly developed points, Kittell has made a number of assertions that I will test against the Ghent evidence. In general, my work differs from Kittell’s in two ways. First, I think that numbers matter. Discussing married women’s legal acts, Kittell stated that “while quantitative data on the relative extent to which they exercised it may well tell us something about routine patterns of day-today social interaction, they have no bearing at all on the issue of women’s legal status.”29 In my view, given the absence of definitive legal texts, how often married women acted is a critical indicator of their legal status. A similar problem arises with her argument that women could hold public office, or as she writes: “the only public offices whose functions women did not exercise in medieval Flanders were those that were collective in nature.”30 She proves that women did hold office in the count’s administration, but only three offices—castellan, receiver, and tax farmer.31 There were, at most, seven women receivers compared to thirty men, and most receiverships were held in fief, meaning that these women might well have been daughters who had no surviving brothers. Furthermore, the number of women receivers declined to fewer than three in the fourteenth century. Kittell proves something very significant about noble women, fief holding, and administration, which is substantiated by

9780230104952_02_int.indd 8

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

9

evidence from elsewhere in France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.32 However, she does not prove that women could hold public office in the cities, where almost all offices were “collective in nature,” and the evidence does not adequately support her global argument that women could hold public office in medieval Flanders and were not “perceived as less authoritative than their male counterparts.”33 A second difference I hold with Kittell’s work is that I believe investigation of women’s economic activities and legal status must be firmly grounded in the particular complex of customs and history of the city or locality. Although there are common patterns, conf lation of evidence from different cities taken out of context can be misleading.34 I certainly believe that Kittell’s assertions merit further investigation, but this must be undertaken with attention to quantitative data and to the specific context of Ghent customary law. Another important issue has been how the status of women changed over time, especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when that status declined.35 In The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550, Martha Howell analyzes thousands of marriage contracts from the Douai city archives to show that marital property law was a vehicle for establishing gender norms. Linking women’s control over wealth to commercial liquidity and economic prosperity, Howell argues that as economic prospects appeared bleaker in the Late Middle Ages, Douaisians grew to prefer patrimonial preservation, which was best ensured by limiting women’s control over wealth. She maintains that the egalitarian customary system embodied a “social illogic” by subjecting a wife to her husband’s control during his lifetime, which left her an ignorant and unprepared “dumb” wife, while simultaneously expecting her to assume control and become a “savvy” widow after her husband’s death.36 The gradual movement to a patrilineal system, in which the widow lost autonomy and control over property, resolved this contradiction and brought social practice into line with prevailing patriarchal attitudes. The earliest records from Ghent reveal a very different dynamic than Howell posited for Douai. There was no tension between expectations that wives should be incapable and widows should be good managers of property in the records from the mid-fourteenth century. Married women often performed legal economic acts, both alone and with their husbands. Marital status was not the chief determinant of women’s economic activities. The tension existed, I argue, between the burgher and patrimonial constructions. Although Douai and Ghent have different legal customs, marital property systems, economic milieux, and political histories, this particularism cannot explain radically different tensions

9780230104952_02_int.indd 9

2/9/2011 12:38:01 PM

10

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

concerning gender norms. The burgher construction of Ghent was built on particular customs and circumstances in that city, but sufficient similarities exist between it and the other cities of the Low Countries to consider that other particular burgher constructions existed throughout the entire region. Beyond issues specific to the Low Countries, the evidence from fourteenth-century Ghent fundamentally challenges parts of the master narrative about women, work, economic activities, and legal capability in the Middle Ages. While there are significant areas of disagreement, most historians hold that a combination of marital status and lifecycle position shaped women’s economic participation throughout northern Europe.37 Because women’s legal capability and work changed with their marital status, their economic lives were discontinuous. According to this master narrative, single women worked in many trades, frequently to earn their dowries, but most worked at low-paying jobs, like spinning and domestic service. They usually did not have enough capital to build up prosperous businesses.38 The work of married women was subsumed under the name of the husband as the head of household. In this master narrative, widows had the most opportunity. They benefited from the return of their dowries and from a one-third share in their husbands’ estates, and could carry on their husbands’ trade after their deaths. This view is often nuanced by considerations of lifecycle position, rather than marital status alone. A woman’s experience varied widely as the number and ages of her children changed and as she grew older. However, most historians stress that it was only in widowhood that a woman had the legal capability and the wealth to pursue truly profitable independent economic activities. Widows were important suppliers of credit, investors in annuities, and businesswomen. Widows held this wealth and power because of the wealth and status they inherited from their husbands. Historians emphasize the transitory and discontinuous nature of women’s work as women practiced several occupations and changed occupations as their marital status changed.39 Compared to men, medieval women had weak work identities. As Judith Bennett writes: “Ale-wives were classic female workers: their work changed with shifts in marital status, their work was relatively low-skilled, their work was unpredictable and unsteady, and their work was highly sensitive to male economic priorities (and susceptible to male incursions).”40 Although women worked in a wide variety of occupations in medieval cities, few were formally apprenticed, and most guilds did not allow them to become masters. Occupations regarded as “women’s work” were poorly paid, low in status, and often part-time. Women only penetrated into a few middlingstatus occupations, particularly when there were labor shortages.

9780230104952_02_int.indd 10

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

11

Evidence from the cities of the Low Countries challenges this master narrative of marital status and lifecycle dependency, discontinuity, and confinement to low-status occupations. Although most historians who study women in the medieval Low Countries argue that the scope of women’s activities was limited by patriarchal structures, they have demonstrated that these women worked in a huge range of occupations, many of which carried middling status.41 The Ghent evidence reveals the same. It is true that most women worked at low-paying, low-status occupations, especially spinning, carding, and combing wool for the cloth industry, but a sizeable number of them worked at middling status occupations, such as dyeing, draping, or mercery. In addition, women were active in an entire range of economic activities—in property management, moneylending, and investment—as well as work, at all stages of their adult lives. Married women were not always legally incapable; single women deployed as much wealth as widows did; and widows were consistently a minority of the women who appeared in the aldermen’s registers dealing with property, credit, production, and sales. Ghent women’s economic lives were not any more discontinuous than those of Ghent men, who also changed occupations and switched economic activities opportunistically. Women’s economic activities in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent fundamentally differ from received notions of women’s roles in the medieval northern European economy, while they resemble what some studies of continental cities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have shown.42 In combination with these studies, my analysis of Ghent’s burgher construction of the mid-fourteenth century argues for revision to the master narrative on women, work, and legal capability in medieval Europe. Close analysis of women’s economic activities in the burgher construction of Ghent also provides crucial background for religious and art historical studies of the Low Countries. The cities of the Low Countries were not only the birthplace of the beguine movement, but also witnessed the survival of beguinages for centuries after they were suppressed elsewhere. As Walter Simons points out, the movement met the needs of many rootless women who had come to the city because of job opportunities in the wool cloth industry.43 Because the beguines continued to work, circulate in public life, and own property even after they had committed themselves to a religious life, understanding the economic environment that sustained them is critically important to investigating their lives.44 In studying the works commissioned by the wealthy elites of the Low Countries, art historians have frequently used gender as a lens to analyze representations, symbols, and depictions of power. A long succession of

9780230104952_02_int.indd 11

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

12

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

countesses, duchesses, and noblewomen were prominent patrons of artistic productions, such as books of hours and the works of the “Flemish Primitives.”45 The Low Countries experienced a succession of female rulers, regents, and politically active consorts, from the Flemish countesses Joan (r. 1206–44) and Margaret (r. 1244–78), who were controversial rulers but exceptional religious patrons, to the fifteenth-century duchesses Isabel of Portugal, Margaret of York, and Mary of Burgundy, who played prominent political roles and were important religious and artistic patrons.46 In religious practice; artistic representation; and religious, artistic, and cultural patronage, medieval Flemish women deployed power and inf luence in a culture that seems to have tolerated this benignly. This study also engages with the issue of identification patterns. As Ellen Kittell has shown for Douai, large numbers of women in medieval Flemish documents were not identified by marital status or by the names of their male relatives, omissions that indicate these women were acting in public with authority.47 Kittell argues this omission does not signal that these women were either single or widowed, but rather that women were identified situationally by a number of social identities. I would extend this even further; omission of marital status and male relatives’ names for such large numbers of women indicates that these identification markers were not critically important to contemporaries. I also expand the inquiry by statistically comparing the activities of women and men; single individuals and married couples; and married, single, and widowed women. I analyze the language of identification, the statistical frequency of identification patterns, and clues about the marital status of these women in order to reconstruct the logic of the medieval identification categories.48 This study repeatedly crosses boundaries between urban and rural, noble and burgher. Problematizing the differences between women’s economic activities in these categories contributes to debates over women and property among the nobility, gentry, patricians, merchants, and other wealthy elite groups in medieval Europe. Because the patricians and merchant elites of Ghent were so wealthy and local nobles and Ghent patricians were so interconnected, the acts of noble, patrician, and elite women and men in the aldermen’s registers offer valuable insights into family structures and ideologies. For the nobility, the construct of the patrilineal family structure, focusing on preservation of a landed patrimony transmitted through a single male heir, has dominated historiography until recently.49 In this structure, noble daughters were supposed to receive dowries in movable property (such as money, annuities, or household goods) rather than inheriting a piece of patrimonial land. Widows were not to inherit real property from their late husbands, but were only

9780230104952_02_int.indd 12

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

13

to receive a portion of the income from that property as usufruct (lifetime use). These strategies preserved the patrimony in the male line, marginalized family women, and reconfigured families as agnatic (important only on the male side) rather than cognatic (important on both sides). In this model, women were passive carriers of property, asked occasionally to consent to the acts of their husbands and male family members, or to act as deputies for family men. Scholarship into sources of actual practice has leveled a number of challenges to the ascendancy of this patrimonial family model among nobles. Studies have shown thirteenth-century aristocratic French women inheriting real property, holding fiefs, taking and receiving oaths, and appearing in court over property disputes while they were single and married.50 The Ghent aldermen’s registers contain many examples of noblewomen owning and managing property, even though the patrimonial construction held a real ideological presence. Noble families and the patrician and urban elite families who intermarried with them had not yet switched entirely to the patrilineage model. Many families continued to view themselves as collateral, giving importance, property, and power to both men and women as family representatives. Although Ghent was an early urban center and a wealthy producer for international trade like the Renaissance Italian cities, family strategies and patterns of wealth circulation differed. In Italian cities, men used women’s dowries to transfer wealth between families and circulate capital, which promoted the growth of the commercial economy.51 In Ghent, women did not receive dowries, and sons and daughters inherited equal portions of property, but wealth was still transferred between families by exchange of marriage “gifts” between men. However, women also circulated their own wealth through the economy by investing in annuities and loaning money, a very different dynamic of wealth circulation and capital formation in comparison to the Italian cities. This study of Ghent offers a perspective on a multitude of debates about women and work, women and property, family systems, and gender in the commercial economy. Sources and Methodology The major source of this study is the annual registers of the aldermen of the Keure, the board of thirteen magistrates who held paramount political and judicial power in Ghent. In keeping with the city’s unwritten customary law, they judged disputes and validated contracts, mostly concerning property and debts, first by witnessing the principals performing a legal economic act, and then by attaching their seal to a parchment

9780230104952_02_int.indd 13

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

14

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

sheet, called the chirograph, which contained a summary of the act. The act quoted on the first page is a summary of a legal performance, in which Lievin van Ansbeke appeared (probably with Kateline Minnemans) before the two aldermen sitting that day and swore that he owed her ten pounds. The aldermen’s clerk then wrote out chirographs for the two and recorded that legal act in the annual register, which now survives in the City Archive of Ghent. Although the aldermen kept registers from the thirteenth century onwards, the oldest surviving register is a fragment from 1339, and the first complete annual register dates from 1349–50.52 This study focuses on the surviving registers from 1339 through 1361, ending when the city’s government was reconfigured into the Three Members system.53 As sources of actual practice, the contracts and legal acts from the registers provide a necessary corrective to prescriptive sources. These acts are brief outlines of specific legal economic actions taken by women and men that can be quantified and compared. The language clerks used in the acts offers insight into gender norms and competing discourses about women’s place in legal and economic spaces. Although these sources are biased towards the elite, they still contain the acts of thousands of people, a much wider cross-section of the population than any other extant lay sources from Ghent. These acts are predominantly ordinary transactions rather than exceptional, sensational, or controversial legal cases. I have taken two main analytical approaches to the acts in the annual registers. The first approach has been quantitative. Because more than 1,500 acts are considered in this study, statistically significant comparisons are possible between different types of acts, particularly concerning property and credit transactions. I have analyzed the marital status of women and compared the numbers of acts involving women and men in different types of transactions, and then considered other axes of difference, such as social status. In order to track social status and associations, I have accessed other contemporary sources, such as the annual registers of the aldermen of the Gedele, who presided over inheritance matters and orphans’ property; the city accounts; city ordinances; and records from guilds and religious institutions.54 I have used prosopographical techniques and a computerized database to identify and track as many individuals as possible, identify their relationships to each other, and re-create wider networks. The second approach was a careful analytical reading of the texts of the acts. Martha Howell argues that law must not be seen as the embodiment of a monolithic consensus of social norms, but rather as a site in which norms are constructed, negotiated, and imposed.55 Following her methodology, I analyze language in the acts to uncover the construction

9780230104952_02_int.indd 14

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION

15

and negotiation of gender norms. These acts are highly formulaic, but the use of different formulas and changes in the wording of formulas can reveal the underlying discourses that informed these acts. Because the ways in which women were identified reveals much about their legal capability in theory and in practice, I have paid particular attention to the various ways in which the aldermen’s clerks identified the principals in each act. I have analyzed the language of acts involving women alone, men and women together, and men alone in order to discern gendered differences. Theories about performance and space have also informed this analysis. The first chapter discusses the economic and political background of mid-fourteenth-century Ghent, setting the stage for the analysis of the city’s custom and questions of women’s marital status and identity, which are the subject of the second chapter. In the next three chapters, I analyze women’s activities in the property markets, the credit system, manufacturing and distribution. In chapter six, I examine the fifteenth-century changes that limited women’s access and opportunities. This book tries to re-create some of the power and presence of the women who stood up before the aldermen and claimed their right to manage their own economic lives; to provide for their families, spouses, children, and friends; and to carry out family investment strategies. Although many of these women probably had difficult lives under the constraints of a patriarchal society, they pushed the limits of the sphere of activity allotted to them in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. Their story is about hard work, canny management, and sharp reasoning, as well as surviving financial losses and the deaths of spouses, parents, and children. It is far from a fairy tale, and the protagonists refused to suffer quietly like patient Griselda. Their story is well worth telling.

9780230104952_02_int.indd 15

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

9780230104952_02_int.indd 16

2/9/2011 12:38:02 PM

CHAPTER 1 THE URBAN CONTEXT

A

drawing from a fourteenth-century manuscript represents one reality in late medieval Ghent—violence in the Friday Market square.1 Four men armed with swords slash at the jumble of their fallen, disarmed foes, while a dog leaps excitedly across the pavement toward the fighters. Buildings frame the open space around the fighters, and male merchants, clustered behind open sacks of grain, survey the scene. On the right side, there are two wooden booths. In the first, a tiny woman stands behind a counter displaying small wares on a cloth, and next to her are two small individuals behind a counter displaying shoes. The artist depicts them as mute onlookers to the violence, peripheral figures in the background, their small size making clear their relative lack of importance.

Untitled Miniature of a Fight on the Friday Market Square

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 17

2/9/2011 12:38:28 PM

18

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Although the manuscript dates from the fifteenth century, it represents a perception of relative significance that permeates the fourteenthcentury accounts. To those who wrote contemporary chronicles, the most important events in Ghent were the battles and political struggles that consumed the city.2 Violent conf lict was common in Ghent’s Friday Market square between the weavers’ and fullers’ guilds, who struggled for economic and political control of the city and its wool cloth trade from the beginning of the fourteenth century until 1360. In this difficult century, multiple conf licts convulsed Ghent, as it struggled to hang on to its waning dominance in the wool cloth trade and its status as the premier quasi-independent city in the richest region of northern Europe. Economic activities, particularly the low and middling economic activities in which women specialized, were small and insignificant in the eyes of elite male contemporaries. This drawing is an inaccurate representation of the relative importance of women’s economic activities to the city of Ghent, but it helps explain women’s access to middling-status, moderately profitable occupations and activities. Women’s economic activities can only be understood within the wider political and economic context. Although urban women were excluded from political life and rarely fought in wars or rebellions, they were related to men who were deeply involved in these events, and they suffered the attendant costs, destruction, increased tax burden, and commercial damages just as men did.3 Absence and distraction of family men probably allowed women to stretch the limits of gendered economic barriers. This chapter analyzes the epidemic, economic, and political developments that affected Ghent in the fourteenth century. It surveys the structure of the city government and the records it produced; Ghent’s social groups; and the status of women in theory, practice, and discourse to sketch the urban background to women’s economic activities. The most famous event of the mid-fourteenth century, the outbreak of the Black Death, paradoxically did not have a decisive impact on women’s economic opportunities in Ghent. While the Black Death certainly affected the lives of Ghent women, it was not the major force that provided them additional economic opportunity. This is in decided contrast to the experience of English women, who may have gained increased access to occupations, if not higher wages, because of a plagueinduced labor shortage.4 The initial outbreak of plague in 1349–51 did not cause as many deaths in Ghent as it did in other large commercial cities, for reasons that remain unclear.5 But the Ghentenars only escaped temporarily; plague struck again in 1358, 1360–61, 1368–69 (the worst outbreak), and throughout the remainder of the fourteenth century. Although people emigrated from the countryside, the Ghent population

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 18

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

19

never grew large enough to fill up the space enclosed by the ambitiously extended fourteenth-century walls.6 In plague years, the number of legal acts and contracts in the annual registers of the Ghent aldermen greatly increased. The earliest surviving full volumes of the aldermen’s registers date from 1349, probably an indication of the impact of deaths from plague.7 However, plague deaths did not cause a labor shortage in Flanders, because economic recession and unemployment in the wool cloth industry had eliminated jobs at a sharper rate. In addition, political disruption and economic downturns in Flanders contrasted sharply with centralized stability and economic growth (at least in production of wool cloth) in England during the period of the Black Death. Plague was not the decisive factor determining Ghent women’s economic activities, but it was yet another burden these women had to bear, along with urban violence, war, economic disruption, and unemployment. In the mid-fourteenth century, Ghent was the second-largest city in northern Europe, with approximately 64,000 residents in the 1350s. Only Paris and perhaps London surpassed it in size among the cities north of the Alps.8 The tiny county of Flanders was a center of early urbanization, trade, and craft production, much like northern and central Italy in the same period.9 Situated along the English Channel and crossed by five major rivers, the sandy, low-lying county was ideally situated for trade with the Rhineland, the Baltic, northern France, and England. Ghent lies at the conf luence of two of these rivers, the Leie and the Scheldt, which f low from the fertile grain-growing regions of northern France to the English Channel. The manufacture of wool cloth began in Roman and Carolingian times, but expanded rapidly in the eleventh century.10 By the thirteenth century, Ghent led a field of three major cloth-producing cities (with Bruges and Ypres), making woolen cloth in both luxury and cheap grades.11 Yearly sales to Italian merchants at the fairs of Champagne and Flanders built the fortunes of Ghent merchant burghers. Immigrants poured into the city from the overpopulated countryside to perform the tasks that went into the production of wool cloth. A sophisticated, specialized production system developed; there were thirty-two separate craft specialties involved in the production of a single piece of luxury woolen cloth, a process that took a year to complete.12 Sixty percent of the population of Ghent worked in one of these crafts of the drapery. The occupations in wool cloth production can be usefully grouped into three levels of profit and status. On the highest level, with the most status and profit, were the wholesale merchants who sold cloth on the international market. They were often the elite within certain cloth guilds, especially the weavers in Ghent, who also traded in raw materials and finished cloth. Because the weavers’ guild controlled so much

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 19

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

20

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

political power, all weavers possessed considerable status. However, most weavers were poorer and less powerful than the wholesale merchants who formed the guild elite. These wholesale merchants generally did not produce cloth, but purchased it from drapers, who managed and supervised the cloth-making process. The precise relationship between the drapers who managed the production of cloth and the wholesalers who sold it in the international market continues to be debated, but it is clear that almost every wholesale merchant was male, whereas some drapers were female.13 Draping was not organized in a guild, but because drapers financed, managed, and supervised cloth production, it conveyed middling status and profit. Dyeing, fulling, and other specialties that were organized into guilds conveyed middling status as well, along with some political clout.14 Women worked at many of those crafts and belonged to some of the guilds, but they were rarely masters. At the bottom of the wool cloth industry were spinning, carding, and combing—poorly paid, time-consuming preparatory tasks overwhelmingly performed by women.15 Elite men dominated the top rank, and poor women dominated the bottom, but both men and women worked at middling-status occupations in the industry. The peak of Flemish wool cloth production came in the mid-thirteenth century. Beginning in the 1270s, the drapery encountered increased difficulties, but scholars today emphasize that the older historiography portraying drastic collapse and depression in the Late Middle Ages (1300– 1500) was severely overdrawn.16 While it was once believed that Ghent and other Flemish cities produced exclusively luxury woolen cloth and so made themselves dependent on wool imported from England, recently, scholars have shown that Ghent did not limit itself to luxury cloth production until the fourteenth century, when its markets for cheaper grades of cloth had largely disappeared. Competition from rural centers and urban Italian cloth producers sharply reduced Ghent’s sales of cheaper cloth in the Mediterranean markets, as war disrupted traditional commercial connections, and international commerce and shipping were taken over by foreign merchants.17 In response to these pressures, the city’s producers focused increasingly on the high-quality cloth made with wool imported from England because it was the most profitable product for a changing market. However, reliance on English wool made the Flemish wool cloth industry vulnerable to the political conf licts between the French king, as titular overlord of Flanders, and the English crown.18 English embargoes, staple regulations, and heavy new taxes on exports of wool shook the wool cloth industry. Although Ghent and other Flemish cities recovered from these blows more quickly than was once thought, in the midfourteenth century, the heyday of Flemish woolen cloth production was

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 20

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

21

over. When the weavers and fullers battled in the Friday Market square, they were fighting for bigger slices of a shrinking pie. In Ghent, a small, wealthy elite in the weavers’ guild had gained control of the drapery by the 1330s. These “weaver-entrepreneurs” controlled the supply of wool and other raw materials to their fellow guild members and the sale of luxury cloth to foreign merchants. As cloth sales declined, the weaver-entrepreneurs forced out or marginalized both female and male competitors and used the guild’s economic and political power to keep other cloth guilds in subsidiary roles.19 Their chief opponents were the members of the fullers’ guild, who were poorly paid and resentful. In the corporate political system of Ghent, the weavers’ guild was one of the “Members” of the city, as were the “small guilds” (kleine neringen), a group of fifty-three nontextile guilds.20 Although some small guilds admitted daughters of masters, and most allowed a widow to continue her husband’s trade, women were barred from holding guild offices because these offices conferred political power. 21 The top officials of the most important guilds belonged to a close-knit oligarchy that controlled Ghent, both politically and economically, passing public offices, tax farms, and provisioning contracts around among their (male) membership.22 The guild elites thus controlled not only their own trades, but also the most lucrative profit opportunities in the city. It is important, however, not to overdraw the portrait of guild power and exclusivity in the mid-fourteenth century. In the 1300s, only a handful of guilds restricted membership to sons of masters, and guild activity was much more f luid than guild regulations indicate.23 Occupational mobility was rampant; from the elite level on down, people regularly changed professions.24 Some belonged to more than one guild, and others did other types of work in addition to the guild craft.25 Both men and women could work at most guild occupations by paying a fee to the guild. However, women were at a particular disadvantage in the guilds because of their exclusion from political power. Women had no voice in guild decisions; they had to rely upon male guild members to protect their guild rights. The structure of guilds and their corporate power in city government marginalized all women, as well as men who were not guild members. As the city adjusted to recession in the drapery, it was also beset by other economic challenges. There were serious grain shortages in the 1330s, 1340s, and 1350s, exacerbated by embargoes, war, and rebellion.26 Flemish Count Louis of Male debased the gold coinage twenty-two times from 1349 to the 1370s, causing severe inf lation.27 Ghent’s salvation was the development of a grain staple, which gave the city control over crucial imports of grain from northern France, and tax revenues

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 21

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

22

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

from the reshipment of grain to the rest of northern Flanders. Growing in importance after 1357, and firmly established by the end of the century, the staple increased the power and importance of the provisioning guilds, who controlled the local and regional comestible markets as well.28 The quiescent merchants standing behind the grain sacks in the opening illustration came to have more economic success than either group of fighters as the grain trade grew and the textile industry declined. Ghent ultimately transformed into a regional market hub, exchanging grain from northern France for peat from northern Flanders and imports from Bruges. But in the crisis-filled decades of the mid-fourteenth century, this happy outcome was far from secured. Most Ghentenars must have been plagued with anxiety as unemployment and loss of income, punctuated by embargo crises and severe inf lation, decimated their livelihoods. Political Power and Conf lict During almost every year in the fourteenth century, Ghent experienced war, revolt, or significant internal violence, as the city was torn by intertwining conf licts at the local, regional, and international levels.29 Generations of Ghent men rebelled, fought, and died to preserve the city’s economic interests, political privileges, and autonomous status, often called its “particularism.” More Ghentenars may have died in warfare from 1339 through 1361 than from the Black Death, which struck three times during this same period. 30 The absence of men from the city (whether on campaign, deceased, or exiled) created more economic opportunities for some women, but the costs from disruption of commerce, destruction of property, and deaths of spouses and family members doubtless outweighed the advantages for most Ghent women. Violent political struggle occurred on three levels: within the city, among families, guilds, and factions; within the county, between the count and the cities; and internationally, between France and England. On the first level, within the city itself, murders and assaults gave rise to revenge killings by male family members of the victims, as personal and family feuds were as much a feature of civic life in Ghent as they were in the Italian cities.31 Guilds and factions among the city’s elites competed for control of city government, following the “little tradition” of Flemish urban revolts.32 By the 1340s, four corporate groups, the “Members,” were recognized competitors for civic power—the landed civic elite, commonly called patricians (poorterij); the weavers’ guild; the fullers’ guild; and the small guilds. The weavers and fullers struggled for economic control of the drapery and participation in city government during the first six decades of the fourteenth century. In 1332, 1337,

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 22

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

23

1345, 1349, 1353, 1359, and 1360, the city was torn by fighting between the guilds.33 In one battle on the Friday Market square in 1345, a chronicler writes that 1,000 weavers and fullers were killed.34 As power shifted back and forth between the two guilds, thousands more were exiled from the city. A second level of conf lict, the “great tradition” of urban revolt, pitted the city of Ghent and its sister-competitors, Bruges and Ypres, against the efforts of the Count of Flanders to centralize authority in his own hands.35 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the counts had encouraged the growth of trade and towns in their county, and had grown very rich as a result. The “Three Cities,” Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, amassed significant wealth and political power. Although the Flemish burghers never tried to supplant the counts themselves, the cities frequently rebelled against comital policies that threatened urban interests. In the fourteenth century alone, Ghent rebelled against the count in 1301–02, 1319, 1325–26, 1328, 1338–49, 1359–61, 1373, and 1379–85.36 The city controlled an extensive hinterland, known as its “Quarter,” and used its militia, formed in guild-affiliated units, to resist comital authority and suppress any economic activities that threatened the primacy of the city guilds.37 The city claimed exclusive rights to try its own citizens, and enrolled thousands of people who lived outside the city, including most of the nobles in its Quarter, as citizens (buitenpoorters).38 Throughout the fourteenth century, the balance of power swung back and forth between the count and the cities. In the 1340s, during the period from which the earliest of the aldermen’s registers survive, Ghent was at its height of autonomous political power and inf luence, largely due to the impact of the wider international conf lict. On the third, international, level of conf lict, Ghent and Flanders were a battleground for the opening stage of the Hundred Years War.39 Most of Flanders was nominally a province of France, but its position as the northernmost province, on the border with the Holy Roman Empire, gave Flanders de facto independence unless the French army was present to enforce the king’s power. Both Edward III of England and Philip VI of France saw Flanders as a valuable prize because of its wealth. Count Louis of Nevers and the nobility were firm supporters of the French crown, as were many urban patricians and grain merchants, because the cities were totally dependent on imports of grain from northern France.40 However, the wool cloth industry depended on imports of English wool, which made the dominant faction in the cities pro-English. The crisis began in 1336, when Edward III ordered an embargo on sales of English wool to Flanders in order to pressure the count and the Flemish cities to back his claims to the French throne. Count Louis of Nevers remained a steadfast

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 23

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

24

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

ally of the Valois French king, despite the disastrous economic collapse in his county. This sparked a revolt in Ghent, where Jacob van Artevelde, dean of the weavers, became military captain, and then ruler of the city.41 Led by Ghent, the revolt spread throughout the county, and Louis of Nevers f led south. When Edward III lifted the embargo on English wool sales in 1340, Van Artevelde and his supporters recognized Edward’s claim to the French throne, and the Ghent militia, along with militias from other Flemish cities, took the field alongside the English army. The revolt of the Flemish cities ended in failure, although Ghent held out until 1349.42 The end of the military crisis, food shortages, and Van Artevelde’s grandiose behavior doomed the revolt. In 1345, a mob led by weavers, his former supporters, assassinated Van Artevelde, as the Flemish cities turned on each other in a civil war. In 1349, the new count, Louis of Male, took Ghent by storm.43 He exiled the weavers and members of the Van Artevelde faction, and instituted a new city government, which included the patricians, the fullers’ guild, and the small guilds, and no weavers. Struggles between the weavers (who were readmitted formally in 1358) and the fullers continued until 1360, when the weavers permanently drove the fullers from power. After almost a century of internal conf lict, the new government established in Ghent in 1360 grew into a stable coalition of civic elites that would govern the city for the next two centuries. The coalition of the Three Members balanced power between the patricians, the weavers, and the small guilds by strictly apportioning all civic offices and promoting compromise, conf lict management, and conservatism.44 The success of this regime suggests that the mid-fourteenth century was not only a time of intense violence, but also of growing weariness with that violence and increasing movement toward consensus, peace, and order among the powerholders in the city. However, Ghent continued its rebellious stance against the counts with a disastrous and costly rebellion in 1379–85 and repeated uprisings in the fifteenth century. The Burgundian dukes (counts of Flanders after 1384) did not bring Ghent under their firm control for another century.45 Although thousands of Ghentenars took to the streets to fight for their families, factions, and guilds, and thousands more marched with their militia units to battle, few of them were women.46 However, there can be no question that women were affected by these events. Besides being notoriously bad for trade, this level of nearly continuous violence would play havoc with family survival strategies and efforts to preserve and increase the assets of individual households. Women’s economic activity did increase in periods of war and rebellion, probably due to the absences, exiles, and deaths of men. The earliest preserved aldermen’s

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 24

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

25

registers come from the years of the Van Artevelde rebellion. Behind the mundane sales contracts and lawsuit dispositions lies a backdrop of political violence and fear of economic loss that we cannot ignore if we hope to understand why Ghentenars acted as they did. Wartime conditions may have increased women’s opportunities, but the continual crisis also added to their burdens. City Government One stable and reassuring pillar of Ghent society was consensus and continuity in the mundane functioning of the city government. Its authority was based on an unwritten body of customs, along with written “privileges” (keuren), which the counts of Flanders had granted to the city. Ghent’s custom was broadly similar to customs of other Flemish towns and rural districts, but also featured unique or “particular” provisions.47 The city of Ghent was governed by two boards of aldermen: the aldermen of the Keure, meaning “privilege,” referring to the charters of rights issued by the counts of Flanders, and the aldermen of the Gedele, meaning “division,” referring to the division of a deceased person’s property among his or her heirs.48 These aldermen (Latin: scabini; Dutch: schepenen; French: échevins) were also magistrates and councillors, as they performed legislative, judicial, and executive functions. Each board had thirteen aldermen, serving for one-year terms, chosen from the powerholding corporations—the weavers’ guild, the fullers’ guild, the patricians, and the small guilds. As the more powerful board, the aldermen of the Keure issued ordinances, adjudicated civil disputes, and prosecuted some criminal matters. They also sealed and authenticated private civil contracts, or acts of “noncontentious jurisdiction” (vrijwillige rechtspraak).49 The aldermen of the Gedele oversaw inheritance customs and supervised the property and guardianship of orphans. This board also supervised the process of “reconciliation” (zoen), a punishment for murder or assault in which the offender paid a sum of money (zoengeld) to all male family members of the victim to prevent retaliation and feuds.50 If a dispute was especially significant, a larger group, called the Great Council (Brede Raad or Collatie), met to hear and decide the case. This group, which included both boards of aldermen and a larger group of representatives of guild officials and prominent citizens, also had binding control of city finances.51 Other authorities also had jurisdiction over certain areas or competencies of the city and its population. Represented by two bailiffs and an amman, the count of Flanders retained jurisdiction over criminal offenses of “high justice” and controlled a castle (the Gravensteen) inside the city and the neighborhood around it.52 Two abbeys, Sint Baafs

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 25

2/9/2011 12:38:29 PM

26

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

and Sint Pieters, retained some jurisdiction over “villages” that were within the fourteenth-century city walls. The courts of the Deacons of Christianity heard cases that pertained to church law and the clergy, and referred other matters, such as separation of married couples, to the bishop’s court at Tournai. In addition to the overlapping and competing authorities within the city walls, the Ghent city government also dominated its Quarter (its hinterland, which amounted to more than one-third of the county), in part by offering a court of appeal to persons discontented with the decisions of local boards of aldermen in smaller towns and rural districts.53 However, even as they insisted that they had precedence over local aldermen, the aldermen of Ghent respected and upheld local customs when they adjudicated routine cases.54 In most matters, the issue was who got to make the decision, rather than what the decision would be. Similarly, even though new boards of aldermen were chosen from the winning factions and corporations every time rebellion or repression changed the regime in Ghent, the routine decisions of those distinct boards of aldermen were remarkably consistent. Even in the most radical period of the Van Artevelde revolt, the majority of aldermen came from wealthy and respected elite families, who shared common ideas about property and resolving disputes. They preferred to supervise negotiation and arbitration rather than to impose a judgment on the litigants. When the aldermen had to make a judgment, they tended to compromise between the two parties.55 They followed custom and precedents, and their overriding concerns seem to have been preservation of property rights and maintenance of public order. The aldermen of the Keure began keeping annual registers in the thirteenth century, but the oldest register that has survived is a fragment from 1339. There are additional fragments from 1343–44 and 1345–46, and the first full register comes from 1349–50.56 These registers, and the three following extant registers, from 1353–54, 1357–58, and 1360-61, form the largest source base for this study. As well as ordinances and judgments of criminal cases, the annual registers contain copies of hundreds of private contracts and judicial decisions on civil lawsuits. In this way they are similar to notarial registers, but the texts in the annual registers were secondary copies of chirographs, loose pieces of parchment that were the official legal documents.57 In Ghent, as throughout the medieval Low Countries, a clerk recorded the contract or official judgment on a sheet of parchment, writing out a copy for each of the interested parties. He drew a decorative border between the copies and then cut the parchment sheet in a waff le pattern so that legal copies could later be verified visually by fitting the copies together. An important party, or parties, then “sealed”

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 26

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

27

the contract, making an impression with their seal in a round clay template attached to the bottom of the chirograph. In addition to the aldermen, church institutions, comital officials, nobles, and patricians sealed chirographs. The sealed chirograph, not the clerk’s copy in a register, was the legal proof of the act. If one of the parties wanted the contract or judgment recorded in the aldermen’s annual register, he or she had to pay the clerk an extra fee. The authority of the aldermen made this investment worthwhile for those wealthy enough to pay for it. Indeed, because of the overlapping jurisdictions and changing balance of power between the count and the cities, members of the elite often had their contracts sealed by as many authorities and recorded in as many registers as possible.58 Those who were not as wealthy purchased only the chirographs, which have not survived. The acts and contracts in the aldermen’s registers are thus only a fraction of those sealed by the aldermen, and represent the elite in disproportionate numbers. The aldermen also dealt with only a small percentage of the economic acts that took place in the city. Many contracts, particularly for small debts and sales on credit, were only finalized orally before witnesses.59 There were also other institutions that handled the bulk of the smaller disputes, debts, and commercial sales on credit. There were six boards of arbiters (vinderijen) based in the six quarters of Ghent, plus additional arbiters in the Meat Hall (the butchers’ market hall) and the fish market.60 The “lords of the Cloth Hall” (halleheeren) recorded sales and debts, and adjudicated small disputes.61 Guilds had their own deans and “sworn men” (gezwornen) who judged matters falling within the jurisdiction of their trade. An older institution of patricians, called the “hereditary people” (erfachtige lieden), witnessed sales of houses and debt contracts, and sealed chirographs. A few of these acts, particularly from the erfachtige lieden, were recorded in the aldermen’s registers, but the rest have not survived. Although there are some surprising and illuminating exceptions, the majority of the acts in the aldermen’s registers involve larger amounts of money changing hands among the more prominent citizens of Ghent and its surrounding countryside. At the same time, each register yields the names of thousands of people, far more than are named in the city account books, which were also maintained by the clerks of the aldermen of the Keure.62 Approximately 40 percent of the acts include women, most of whom appear nowhere else in the historical record. Although they are skewed towards the elite, these registers offer us evidence of actual practice in legal and economic affairs, an essential counterpart to the laws and prescriptive sources, which ref lect what was supposed to happen, rather than what did happen.

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 27

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

28

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Social Groups and Customs The society of mid-fourteenth-century Ghent was hierarchically organized in a manner similar to other medieval cities, although there was less distance between urban and rural social groups and a higher degree of social mobility. Overshadowed by the powerful and wealthy cities, the Flemish nobility was much weaker than the French or English nobility, but not as completely subordinated to the city as were their counterparts in northern and central Italy.63 The Flemish nobility spoke French, followed French noble culture and customs, and was oriented towards the French court. Many Flemish nobles served in the French armies under the count of Flanders, and many, including the count himself, were among the French nobles who were slaughtered in the battle of Crécy (1346). Deaths and extended absence made them particularly vulnerable at the time of this study, as were their fellow French nobles to the south. The lesser nobility in the Ghent quarter often gave their allegiance to the powerful city, enrolling as citizens (buitenpoorters), marrying into patrician families, and serving in city government.64 Some families, such as the Van Vaernewijcs, were always addressed as nobles, but also practiced business in the city, held important positions in city government, and took the city’s side against the count.65 At the same time, the lure of the noble lifestyle, status, and culture had a powerful effect on urban burgher elites.66 Among the non-noble burghers of Ghent, the patricians were the highest social group because they were descended from the original merchants who owned land in the city.67 The patricians controlled Ghent city government completely until 1302, when they were forced to share power with the guilds.68 Patricians began buying rural land and intermarrying with the nobility in the thirteenth century, and by the fifteenth century, many had become nobles. They were also brokers and hostelers, making money from the regional and international trade in grain, cloth, and other commodities.69 They continued to invest in urban commerce as well as buying rural land, and they collectively maintained a strong political presence as the Member of the poorterij.70 The wealthiest and most dominant men in the guilds formed a social group of “guild elites.”71 Some were also members of patrician families who had purchased guild membership in order to profit from mercantile activities and acquire an additional political base. Each guild was a vertical social structure, containing poor, middling, and wealthy members, dominated at the top by this elite, who supplied raw materials to their fellow craftsmen and women. Members of guild elites were usually chosen as deans and sworn men for the guilds. The elite members of the most powerful guilds, especially the weavers’ guild and the provisioning

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 28

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

29

guilds, such as the butchers, bakers, brewers, and shippers, became aldermen. Guild elites operated more as merchants and suppliers than as producers, and monopolized the most profitable international trade opportunities, such as contracts to supply cloth and wine to the city, and farms of indirect taxes. In practice, nobles, patricians, and guild elites were less like separate social groups and more like elite interest groups. They intermarried, engaged in business together, and joined together in political factions. At the middling level of urban society were rank-and-file guildsmen and those producers and shop owners who were moderately prosperous in trades and occupations that were not organized into guilds. Middling and poorer craftsmen who belonged to guilds tended to identify closely with their guilds and to promote their guilds’ political goals. Non-elite guildsmen were the main participants in the frequent revolts and street demonstrations (wapeningen).72 Unemployment, inf lation, and grain shortages in the 1350s would have cut deeply into the standard of living of these craftspeople, who were more vulnerable to economic trouble than the wealthy elites.73 Members of the small guilds were more fortunate, and employment and profits in the provisioning guilds increased steadily from the late 1350s. Below them in the social order were the poor, unemployed or underemployed, those in low-paying occupations like spinning or day labor, and recent immigrants from the countryside. Evidence from charitable institutions, such as hospitals and poor tables, indicates that about 3 percent of the city received charity on a regular basis, but contemporaries commented about the high numbers of poor, particularly before 1348 and after 1380.74 The poor would have suffered extremely when grain was short and prices inf lated, and many women who lost male family members to war must have slipped into this group. Both elites and those lower on the social ladder maintained multiple networks of family, friends, neighbors, guild, and parish that helped them cope with the difficulty and uncertainty of mid-fourteenth-century life.75 Street violence and blood feuds made dependence on family and other networks of support even more necessary.76 Guilds and their religious confraternities supported their members, as did charitable institutions, churches, and chapels. Within the fourteenth-century city walls, there were four large churches and numerous smaller ones, fourteen monasteries, convents, and other religious institutions for both male and female religious, and nine hospitals and charitable institutions.77 Powerful families supported local churches with endowments and donations, and led the administration of poor relief and church maintenance. Social networks built on institutional connections and familial relationships were essential for individual success.

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 29

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

30

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

The Social Position of Women Ghent was clearly a patriarchal society, particularly in the political realm. Custom and practice rigidly excluded women from positions of power in the city. Burgher women had less public political power than did noblewomen, who could hold court and administer justice as deputies of absent husbands and act as regents for minor children. Urban women are never found in either guild or city offices, although they did sometimes act as low-level inspectors and appraisers.78 The public political culture was predominantly male, from the negotiation sessions of the aldermen and various elite groups to the armed demonstrations and battles of massed guild members.79 Although women participated in these activities, they were few in number and probably regarded as interlopers in male space. Furthermore, the exclusion of women from political activities meant that they had no say in the making and enforcing of laws that affected their lives, and thus no voice to defend their social and economic interests when these were threatened by guild regulations or civic ordinances.80 In sharp contrast to their political exclusion, other tenets of Ghent customary law gave women access to some legal and economic power in public space. Widows and adult single women could perform virtually all judicial acts.81 They did not need male guardians or agents (mambours) to represent them in legal actions, as did women in nearby Brabant. There were no specific limitations on women as witnesses, as there were in Lille and Audenarde, although in criminal cases, authorities considered women to be inferior witnesses to men.82 Parents shared legal authority over their children. Both daughters and sons could be emancipated from parental authority at the age of majority, which in the fourteenth century was typically when the child moved out of the parental household. Minors of both sexes became emancipated when they married or took religious vows. If a woman was widowed before she reached the age of majority, she remained emancipated.83 Custom treated emancipated single women and widows as fully capable legal persons. According to the partible inheritance custom of Ghent, all sons and daughters received equal shares of the inheritance from their parents, with no privileges for either sex or birth order. This held true for all types of property, except rural fiefs, which, under the customs of feudal tenure, went to the eldest son.84 The aldermen of the Gedele handled orphan girls’ and boys’ property in exactly the same manner.85 Widows and widowers inherited exactly the same proportions of their late spouse’s estates—full ownership of one-half of the community property and usufruct of onehalf of the personal property and half of the heirs’ portion of the community property.86 The largest advantage that Ghent women enjoyed

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 30

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

31

was the almost gender-blind inheritance custom, which put significant amounts of property in their hands. Research into the social lives of Ghent women has shown that while they enjoyed certain advantages, they were subject to many of the same limits as women elsewhere in medieval Europe. One advantage was a fairly equal treatment of boys and girls. Infanticide and child abandonment were rare in Flemish cities, and there were many illegitimate children, perhaps indicating that many men and women cohabited without the benefit of marriage.87 Both girls and boys were sent to elementary schools, which were sometimes coeducational, or were tutored at home. Women and men of the middling and elite social groups were typically literate, but opportunities for advanced study were reserved for men.88 Elite women were not sequestered, and wealthy single women and widows were particularly vulnerable to kidnapping, rape, and forced marriage (although many cases were actually elopements).89 In guild and craft families, parents trained both boys and girls and expected them both to work, but girls were far less likely to be formally apprenticed in a trade. Common practice prepared young women to support themselves as well as to marry.90 Marriages followed the northern or northwestern European pattern. Men and women married in their mid-twenties, at roughly the same age, because they delayed marriage until they had the funds to set up their own households.91 The expectation was that when women married, they became subject to their husbands, who were the heads of the new households. A woman’s chastity was the focus of much energy and concern, and formed the basis of her honor. Saints’ lives, penitentials, and sermon literature emphasize women’s sexual behavior and their consumerism, overspending, and love of finery.92 In dispute resolutions and in the emerging Flemish burgher literature, contemporaries commented on women’s “evil words” leading to or exacerbating disruptions of public order, but also praised women who gave wise counsel to their husbands or helped bring about resolution of disputes.93 Otherwise, women were largely ignored, and comments on women’s economic activities are exceedingly rare. All of these tropes, familiar features in pre-modern northern Europe, indicate that women in Ghent were subject to many of the same restrictive gender roles and cultural discourses as women elsewhere.94 Another common pattern was that many adult women remained single. In 1492, approximately 13 percent of taxpayers in Ghent were single women (in their own households), but there are no similar records for the fourteenth century.95 As in most proto-industrial cities in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, Ghent likely had more women than men.

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 31

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

32

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Deaths of men due to feuds, rebellion, and war probably contributed to the sex ratio imbalance, and many surplus single women were poor young women from the countryside who were attracted to the city by employment opportunities in service or the wool cloth industry. However, a significant number of young women from more prosperous urban groups also delayed marriage and perhaps never married at all. In the second half of the fifteenth century, 21 percent of orphan girls (almost all from middling or elite families) were officially emancipated from their guardians, probably at age twenty-four, still unmarried.96 Although many may have married later, one out of every five elite women experienced a period of independence from parents, guardians, or husbands, rather than passing directly from the authority of one man to the authority of another. Some of these women may have become beguines, joining religious communities, adopting celibacy and a simple lifestyle, but not taking vows or becoming cloistered like nuns. Ghent had a large population of beguines, who lived in court beguinages, little walled neighborhoods with houses owned by individual beguines.97 There were two large court beguinages in Ghent, one with between 100 and 400 beguines, and the other with 610 to 730 beguines, plus several smaller ones. In the late thirteenth century, beguines comprised an estimated 1.7 percent of Ghent’s population.98 Beguines did not withdraw from the world, but instead worked to support themselves, particularly in the wool cloth industry, as well as doing charitable work. Little is known about their membership in the fourteenth century, but in the late fifteenth century, over half of the beguines in the St. Elizabeth’s beguinage, the city’s largest, came from elite families.99 Beguines were not marginal figures in Flemish urban life, and their status appears to have been respectable enough that they could offer a real alternative to Ghent women of means who did not want to marry and did not want to be cloistered. Beguinages may have also offered a place of refuge and support for women of means who were not able to marry, or whose families were decimated by war, rebellion, and plague. This sketch of the city’s social groups and the position of women suggests that some of the traditional characteristics of the northern European urban family system and division of gender roles in the economy pertained in Ghent. The Ghent burgher construction was based on the city’s particular customs, especially its partible inheritance and marital property customs. In the burgher family system, husbands were heads of households, but wives shared in property ownership, daily management, and responsibility. Property transmission and kinship networks operated on both sides of the family, and both male and female heirs were transmitters and conservators of what is commonly called the “patrimony.” Daughters

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 32

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

TH E U R BA N CONTEXT

33

who married transmitted the patrimony to their children, who were part of the family, just as the children of sons were. Daughters who remained single held their portion of the patrimony and were supposed to pass it on to their closest heirs in the family. In the same manner, family connections did not pass down entirely in patrilineal fashion, but spread out vertically along male and female lines. Ghent daughters as well as sons needed to know how to manage property because both were responsible for preserving the family’s patrimony. In keeping with the burgher construction, most medieval Ghentenars recognized the potential capability of women to make good economic decisions. At the same time, they were also exposed to the alternative discourses about women’s roles that circulated in medieval Europe through speech, literature, and sermons. The city’s particular legal customs, economic forces, and political entanglements dictated the exact formulation of its burgher construction, but outside forces, many of them highly patrimonial, also inf luenced Ghent’s inhabitants. Conclusion Women’s economic activities recorded in the aldermen’s registers occurred against a backdrop of economic recession, plague, war, and rebellion. The economy of Ghent was under serious stress, as its share of the wool cloth market shrank. The city was periodically convulsed by violence between families, political factions, and guilds; rebellion against the count; and war between the French and English. Absences of men on campaign and a higher death toll for men than women allowed some women the opportunity to move into male occupations. The same processes forced other women to act economically, whether they wanted to or not, because there was no man to act for them. However, the absence of men from mid-fourteenth-century crisis did not create the burgher construction. The burgher family system had prepared women to handle property, work at the family’s craft, and add to the household income, so women were both expected and trained to step into economic management roles. It is also probable that most people thought that the kinds of activities women might do were just not very important compared to the huge wool, cloth, and grain deals that male merchants negotiated, or the demonstrations, battles, and political negotiations that took place in the exclusively male political arena. Ghentenars, like all people, responded to crisis in ways that made sense in their culture, drawing on the social patterns and customs that had worked in the past and utilizing all family members in creative ways that helped ensure the family’s property, status, and honor. Although

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 33

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

34

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

there are broad and significant commonalities with the rest of Flanders, the northwestern continental region, and all of medieval Europe, it was the particular, individual combination of small features in Ghent that gave women more legal capability and access to specific economic niches. Patriarchal restrictions barred women from full participation in political and economic structures, but women continually made use of tiny local exceptions, overlooked niches, and social networks to earn a living, make a profit, and help their families survive. The opening illustration of the fight in the Friday Market square portrays the female marketseller as an unimportant bystander in an exclusively male struggle for power. To contemporaries, women’s economic activities certainly paled in significance next to the consuming political struggles of the era. However, analysis of mid-fourteenth-century economic acts from the annual registers of the aldermen of the Keure will show that individual women pursued economic activities avidly. In doing so, they often stretched boundaries, while their economic activities helped the city survive.

9780230104952_03_ch01.indd 34

2/9/2011 12:38:30 PM

CHAPTER 2 ACTIVITY AND CONTINUITY: PATTERNS OF WOMEN’S ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION

O

n March 19, 1350, Ghiselbrecht van Wondelghem came before the aldermen of the Keure in Ghent and appointed Beatrise Blanckaerds to collect a debt owed to him by Jan Braem. After presenting the debt contract, Ghiselbrecht followed a procedure from the city’s oral custom to empower Beatrise to collect the debt.1 There is no explanation for his action, although another act informs us that the two were relatives.2 Five days later, Beatrise took Jan before the aldermen, who ordered him to pay the debt of nine pounds and ten shillings groot (more than a master guildsmen would earn in sixteen months) to her within two weeks. If Jan did not pay, Boudin de Kempe, as his surety, or co-signer, had to pay that amount to Beatrise or suffer imprisonment.3 Having successfully fulfilled her legal and economic role as a collection agent, Beatrise Blanckaerds then disappeared from the historical record, although this was probably only one of her many economic activities.4 Beatrise Blanckaerds is in many ways typical of the women who appeared in the legal acts, contracts, and judgments recorded in the annual registers of the aldermen of the Keure. Like most of the women and men in the acts, little other information about her has survived. She is only identified by a title, joncvrouw, which did not refer to her age or marital status, but designated her social status as an elite or middlingstatus woman. Like 45 percent of the women who appear in the annual registers, Beatrise was not identified by the name of a male family member, nor by her marital status.5 In a striking lack of attention to standard identifiers for medieval women, neither the aldermen, the clerk, nor the litigants considered Beatrise’s marital status important enough to record.6

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 35

2/9/2011 12:37:25 PM

36

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

The clerk used exactly the same words and phrases for the actions of this female representative that he and his colleagues used to describe the actions of male representatives. She had been empowered to act in this case, she had the paperwork to prove it, and thus she was a fully capable legal person. Although more men than women were appointed as debt collectors, Beatrise Blanckaerds was not exceptional. Twenty-four percent of the economic legal acts in the aldermen’s registers include at least one woman who acted “in her own name,” speaking for herself without visible supervision or interference from male relatives. Ghiselbrecht and hundreds of other Ghent men relied on women from their families to perform legal acts and manage property. These activities of women were crucial to the operation of the burgher family system. Based on the evidence from the aldermen’s registers, I argue that marital status was not the most important determinant of a woman’s economic activities in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. Single women, married women, and even nuns were often publicly involved in managing the property they owned. Women’s economic lives were relatively continuous because they did not have to wait until they were widows to gain experience in investment and management.7 While in a few cases men acted for women family members in a patrimonial construction of gender roles in property management, far more common was the burgher construction in which women’s involvement in property management was widely accepted. Prescriptive Norms and Actual Practice The written, prescriptive sources for gender norms in Ghent date from the sixteenth century, when the Ghent customary law was first redacted. Before this, the custom was a compilation of oral traditions, privileges granted by the counts, ordinances of the aldermen, and important judgments that served as precedents.8 In inheritance, marital property, and the legal capability of women, the Ghent custom was similar to the customs of the surrounding countryside and other cities in the Low Countries. The custom probably originated in the practices of “Germanic” or “Frankish” people who lived in the countryside of the Low Countries in the early Middle Ages, and changed in the emerging cities.9 Since charters of privileges and civic ordinances surviving from the fourteenth century usually have little to say about gender roles, historians have cautiously filled in the gaps with prescriptive sources from other cities of the southern Low Countries, or with the Ghent Coutume Homologuée, the written custom redacted in 1563.10

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 36

2/9/2011 12:37:25 PM

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

37

The main difficulty with using the Coutume Homologuée to discern prescriptive gender norms is that there is widespread evidence of the reconstruction of these norms in the Low Countries (and elsewhere) in this period.11 As legal historians have cautioned, we cannot be sure that any of the provisions of the sixteenth-century Coutume Homologuée applied in the fourteenth century unless their operation can be observed in ordinances or documents of actual practice from that time.12 Comparing the written custom and fourteenth-century acts from the aldermen’s registers shows that some provisions of the custom appear to be relatively unchanged, while in others, a sixteenth-century overlay has revised fourteenth-century norms. One example of a relatively unchanged section in the Ghent customary law is the fully partible inheritance custom for all types of property except fiefs.13 Sons and daughters inherited equal shares of their parents’ property, without regard for age or sex. The core provisions of the marital property custom also appear to be much the same. This custom divided the couple’s assets into community property, owned by both spouses and controlled by the husband, and personal property [eigen goed] owned by each spouse. Parents contributed money and other forms of property towards their children’s marriages, but women did not have dowries. Ghent custom did not recognize either dowry or dower rights as legally binding.14 When one of the spouses died, the surviving spouse inherited half of the community property, and the heirs inherited the other half and all of the personal property of the deceased. The surviving spouse received a lifetime usufruct [bijleving] of half of the heirs’ half of the community property and half of the personal property of the deceased. Widows and widowers were responsible for all debts, and could do whatever they wished with their half of the marital community property, including carrying that property into a second marriage.15 Provisions were exactly the same for widowers and widows; both inherited the same portions under the same rules, and both had the same rights and responsibilities. Although there were changes in the categorization of property as movable or immovable between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, there was little apparent change in the Ghent community property and personal property system and the egalitarian rights and responsibilities of widows and widowers.16 However, comparisons of sixteenth-century written customs and documents from earlier periods show extensive changes in other areas, such as the age of majority.17 The Coutume Homologuée set the age of majority and emancipation from guardianship at twenty-five, the age prescribed in Roman law. This was the earliest surviving record of a specific age of majority for Ghent. Prescriptive texts from elsewhere in

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 37

2/9/2011 12:37:25 PM

38

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

the Low Countries set the age of majority variously at twelve for girls and fifteen for boys (Valenciennes, 1114, Ypres, circa 1300, and Lille, 1388), at twenty-five (Boutersem, 1255), fifteen (Tournai, circa 1250, and Huy, circa 1400), or at fourteen or fifteen (Limbourg, circa 1400).18 Ghent sources of actual practice suggest that the real “emancipation” occurred when a child moved out of his or her parents’ house, rather than at a particular age. What was a f lexible and undefined principle in earlier centuries became an established, written, fixed rule with the redaction of the custom. Another change was increased restriction on the ability of married women to act legally. The Coutume Homologuée dictated that a married woman was legally incapable: “Married women are in the power of their husbands, in such a way that they cannot make contracts, acknowledgments, or obligations . . . without the knowledge and consent of their husbands.”19 The husband had complete control over the community property and was not obligated to consult his wife. 20 He also had control over her personal property, but had to secure her consent before selling or alienating it. However, other provisions of the Coutume Homologuée contradicted or undercut a married woman’s incapability. Married women could make wills and buy household commodities without permission from their husbands. If a married woman’s husband was unavailable or refused to bring or answer a lawsuit concerning her person or property, she could petition the aldermen of the Keure. As long as the aldermen approved, she could then bring or answer the lawsuit herself.21 If she was a public merchant or marketseller [openbare coopwijf ] engaged in a trade other than that of her husband, none of the restrictions on married women applied to her business activities. Like the English femme sole, she was fully legally capable and could enter into contracts, obligations, and debts.22 Coopwijf status in Ghent was based on public knowledge rather than on a formal legal act. Finally, the Coutume Homologuée stated that husbands and wives were responsible for each others’ inherited debts.23 The mix of restrictive and lenient measures in these written provisions on married women’s legal capability is the result of changing gender norms and the redaction process. Under orders from the Habsburg state, the Ghent aldermen of the Keure and the Gedele appointed legal experts to collect customs from witnesses and organize them into categories. The state published this in 1546 as the “Cahier Primitif.” In the next stage, the aldermen and their committee eliminated some customs and combined and rewrote others, streamlining, modernizing, and organizing the body of customs to produce the Coutume Homologué in 1563. The lawyers who composed the custom included strong statements about the authority of

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 38

2/9/2011 12:37:25 PM

39

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

husbands because of current cultural expectations, while more egalitarian provisions probably survived from older customs.24 The Cahier Primitif included two provisions that upheld all contracts made by a wife without her husband’s consent, if those contracts were to her advantage, and negated those contracts that were not to her advantage. 25 A third provision authorized a wife to act legally for the couple if her husband was absent, insane, or otherwise “notoriously” incapable.26 None of these provisions was included in the Coutume Homologuée. The first two provisions may have been omitted because they contradicted other provisions or because they were less firmly rooted in practice. Certainly they did not apply in the fourteenth century. 27 But the last provision, authorizing a wife to carry on the couple’s business in her husband’s absence or incompetence, clearly gave married women a strong legal presence, and certainly existed in the fourteenth century. 28 It did not specifically contradict any provisions, but the lawyers dropped it from the final version of the custom. Redaction of the custom offered an opportunity for elite writers in a changing society to reinforce those customs they favored and to minimize or eliminate those they did not. 29 Beyond purposeful revision of norms, the legal climate of the sixteenth century was heavily inf luenced by Roman law and evinced a concern for categorization and definition that was not evident in the fourteenth century. There is, for example, no mention of “female public merchant” (coopwijf ) status in any of the fourteenth-century ordinances or the acts from the annual registers of the Ghent aldermen.30 In those acts, married women simply appeared and acted alone, as this judgment from 1358 shows: Know all that in the dispute that was between Joes den Vos on one side and Kateline, wife of Heinric van Oesterzele, on the other side, the aldermen of the Keure . . . [heard] the story and the counterstory and everything that was presented to them about the three pounds groot that Kateline was ordered to give Joes. [They] decided that Joes was to take off one pound, in reduction of the three pounds, for Kateline’s chattels that he has . . . So Joes declares that he has been satisfied by Kateline about the two pounds and the dispute . . . 31

While Kateline may have been a coopwijf conducting a business other than that of her husband, there is no indication in the act itself that distinguishes that status.32 Perhaps the aldermen verified orally that she was conducting her own business, or asked her to swear that she had her husband’s permission, but the clerk did not consider that important enough

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 39

2/9/2011 12:37:25 PM

40

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

to include in the written act.33 Beyond the identification of Kateline as Heinric’s wife, there is no difference in the language used in this act with a married woman as a debtor and in acts with men as debtors. This informal allowance of legal capability to married women began to disappear in the fifteenth century, as chapter six details. A new legal status, “her own woman” (haer selves wijf ), appears after 1400 to describe some women who were representing themselves.34 The term “coopwijf ” appears in acts from the latter half of the fifteenth century.35 The appearance of labels, official categories, and accompanying explanations suggests a tightening of control. The formal coopwijf status was likely a later invention, a formal legal category developed in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, probably designed to define the economic activities of married women more strictly.36 The evolution of the coopwijf status, like the evolution of the age of emancipation, shows that the sixteenth-century Coutume Homologuée has limited usefulness as a source for understanding the norms and ideals of fourteenth-century Ghent society, and even less as a source for actual practice. Documents of actual practice, such as contracts and judgments, reveal how people understood the unwritten custom at that given moment. The legal acts from the aldermen’s registers are highly formulaic, but the choice of formulas and changes in the wording of formulas reveal the underlying discourses that informed these acts. The formulas reveal what the aldermen and their clerks thought must be included to make the acts legal and binding.37 We can draw conclusions about who the participants, the aldermen, and their clerks thought were the most important actors in this legal space and how they stood in relationship to each other. The following sales contract, for example, contains the names of the sellers and the buyers, and the description and value of the property sold (in this case, an annuity): Be it known to all that Diederic uten Rosen and Joncvrouw Kateline his legal wife came before the aldermen . . . [and] declared that they had sold to Joncvrouw Alise van Coleghem and Joncvrouw Mergriete, her sister, a hereditary annuity of eleven pounds and three shillings parisis per year that they had on the city lot where Joncvrouw Juete Speciers lives, on the Hoogpoort [street], for four pounds parisis per year, and on the city lot where Meester Gillis de Wapensmedere lives, for eight pounds parisis per year, and on the city lot where Macharijs Witman’s widow and her children’s house stands . . .38

By “selling” a “heredity” annuity, Diederic uten Rosen and his wife Kateline were agreeing to pay eleven pounds every year for several generations. The buyers, two sisters, paid the couple a large lump sum of money

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 40

2/9/2011 12:37:25 PM

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

41

in exchange for those future annual payments. If Diederic and Kateline failed to pay Alise and Mergriete, the sisters could confiscate the land (in this case, city lots) put up as collateral. This act does not tell us Kateline’s surname, nor where the sisters obtained the funds, nor how Diederic and Kateline planned to use the money. The act states that the married couple appeared together, but we do not know whether Kateline stood silently and let her husband speak for her, or whether she was the one who spoke while he stood nodding at her elbow. The act does, however, reveal much useful information about how the aldermen, their clerks, and medieval Ghentenars viewed the role of women in economic activities. The clerk’s use of identification shows that marital status was not the only, or even the primary, way in which women were identified.39 He identified Kateline as a married woman and the unnamed former wife of Macharijs Witman as a widow, but the other three women were not identified by a male family member nor by their marital status. Like Beatrise Blanckaerds, four women were identified as joncvrouwen, meaning that they were from either elite or middling groups. Another type of identification explained the relationship between each person and the property in question.40 The aldermen and their clerks almost always identified who owned the property and how they had come to own the property. For example, the identification of the final woman as “Macharijs Witman’s widow” ref lects property division under the inheritance custom. Macharijs Witman and his wife had owned the house as community property, and at his death, half of the house went to his children and half went to his widow. The clerk identified the house by the late owner’s name and the current owners only by their relation to the late owner. The widow’s name was not important to the legal act, because the property had come from her husband. Identifying a widow only by that label and her late husband’s name occurs very commonly in the registers to indicate when a widow was managing property she had inherited from her late husband. A third kind of identification probably originated from public knowledge. The clerk identified one city lot as “where Joncvrouw Juete Speciers lives,” suggesting that everyone knew her by that name. The clerks probably also paid attention to how the woman introduced herself to the aldermen, and, since the clients paid for the acts, they could also instruct the clerk to identify them in a specific manner. These three factors—who had originally owned the property, how the woman was publicly known, and how she identified herself—determined whether the clerk included her name, marital status, and/or the names of her male relatives. In almost half of the identifications for women in the mid-fourteenth-century registers, a woman’s own name was sufficient.

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 41

2/9/2011 12:37:26 PM

42

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

This is a striking contrast to the strict limits on women’s activities and concern for their marital status evident in the Coutume Homologuée. The fourteenth-century aldermen were precise about definition of property and to whom it belonged, but quite unconcerned about verifying that women had the authority to act legally and manage their own property, even when those women were married. In the public space of the aldermen’s chamber, legal economic acts performed by women were accepted, noncontroversial, and routine. Activity: The Extent of Women’s Economic Participation Almost half of the 1580 economic acts—loan contracts, sales contracts, and lawsuit documents—in the mid-fourteenth-century aldermen’s registers included at least one woman. Figure 2.1 features a number of gender and activity status categories for the 1580 acts, which will be used repeatedly in the charts of this book.41 The “Men Only” category indicates acts with no women principals, and contains 844 acts, or 54 percent of the total. This majority, and the fact that the absolute number of men was much higher than the absolute number of women, show that men and women were not equal participants in the city’s economy. The “Women in Their Own Names” category features women performing legal economic acts without male permission, oversight, or

Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial) 51 3% Represented Women 61 4%

Women in More Than One Category 101 6%

Women in Their Own Names 375 24% Wives with Husbands 148 9%

Men Only 844 54%

Figure 2.1 Gender and Activity Status in Economic Acts from the Annual Registers of the Alderman of the Keure, 1339–1361 (Total = 1580)

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 42

2/9/2011 12:37:26 PM

43

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

representation. There were 375 acts, or 24 percent of the total, with at least one woman acting in her own name. This does not mean that these women were always acting independently. Instead of privileging the actions a medieval woman took on her own behalf over her actions on behalf of her household and family, I have chosen to use the action itself as a criterion. The active and unassisted pursuit of one’s own and/or one’s family’s interests before the aldermen of Keure constitutes deploying power in a public space, regardless of the dependency of the individual in other spaces. Most women who acted in their own names probably consulted family members before acting, just as most medieval men would have done, in a time when acting independently was a better indication of desperate isolation than empowerment. However, the category of “Women in Their Own Names” does not include acts in which women owned property but did not perform any action, nor any acts in which husbands and wives appeared together. For an individual to be counted in this category, the act has to state or imply a set of behaviors—the physical presence of the woman before the aldermen, speaking for herself and performing the legal act. The “Wives with Husbands” category contains 148 acts, or 9 percent of the total. This category features women who appeared with their husbands before the aldermen, and whose names appear after their husbands’ names consistently throughout the act, with no language denoting subordination. The following act gives an example of “wives with husbands”: Be it known that Jan ser Maecheleins and Joncvrouw Celie his legal wife came before the aldermen . . . [and] declared that they have legally sold to Pieter Uten Wissele half of the house and the city lot called the Tielroden . . . for a sum of money which Jan and Joncvrouw Celie his wife acknowledge that he [Pieter] has paid to them . . .42

Jan’s and Celie’s names appear together throughout the act, and thirdperson plural pronouns are used. Celie may have had no real say in the decision to sell the property, but she was present. At a minimum, she had to give her consent, which gave her some knowledge of Jan’s actions. The names of husbands and wives also appear consistently together in many acts that do not involve sales of property. Although there was no legal requirement for wives to consent to loans their husbands made from community property, husbands and wives often appeared together extending loans, selling on credit, and borrowing money, as in this act from 1346: Be it known that Lievin Acharis and Lijsbette his wife came in person before the aldermen . . . [and] declared that they owe . . . sir Gherard

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 43

2/9/2011 12:37:26 PM

44

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Leewarde 44-1/2 gulden. They promise to pay this sum, as they themselves said, at two intervals . . .43

The lack of legal requirement and the repetition of both names strongly suggests that these wives were economic partners of their husbands. Wives could build upon their experience of managing their own property as single women, and, as widows, apply the experience they had gained by being involved in both their late husband’s affairs and their own economic ventures. There are two categories for acts in which women were represented by someone else. The first is the “Represented Women” category, with sixty-one acts, or 4 percent of the total. This category includes acts in which a woman was represented by a man (or another woman) because she was a minor under guardianship, or a noblewoman who had dispatched a representative to the city courts.44 Other “Represented Women” were recipients of gifts and bequests. The key element of this category is that these women were not taking action themselves, but the conditions that made them passive—receiving a gift or bequest, minority, use of employees—were not gender-specific. It also includes cases of temporary representation in which clerks used the same legal phrases, regardless of sex.45 Temporary representation could apply equally to men and women, as the following quit declaration (or receipt) shows: Be it known that Joncvrouw Cateline Houdewinds, on behalf of herself and Jan Staveliin whom she represents in this case, [and] Jan Libersa, on behalf of himself and Lisbette Ghiseliins whom he represents in this case, have come before the aldermen . . . [and] declared that they have been paid and satisfied by Willem den Quinquere for the ten pounds groot minus eight pence, which he promised them . . . .46

In this case, a woman represented a man, and another man represented another woman. The representation was temporary (“in this case”) and the clerks used the same succinct phrases for men representing women and women representing men. In these cases, the clerks were not implying a dependent status for the represented woman. The second category for representation, “Adult Women under Guardianship,” contains acts in which male guardians represented adult women or husbands represented their wives. There are fifty-one acts in this category, or 3 percent of the total. When a clerk wrote that a husband was acting as the guardian [voogd] of his wife, she was clearly subordinate because of her sex. However, I have placed any act in which a husband acted for his wife in this category, even though some of these husbands

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 44

2/9/2011 12:37:26 PM

45

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

and wives might have been private economic partners. This caution prevents potential overstatement of the level of women’s economic activities in the analysis that follows. The final category, “Women in More than One Category,” contains various combinations of all the categories except “Men Only,” to provide for cases in which two or more women appear, one as a woman in her own name and another as a wife with her husband, for example. All of the acts in the three categories of “Women in Their Own Names,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “Represented Women” were written using what I term the burgher construction of women’s roles in the economy. As a cluster of words, phrases, and formulas, the burgher construction was dominant but not universal. The remaining category, “Adult Women under Guardianship,” contains acts written in the patrimonial construction, in which clerks used starkly different words and phrases that expressed the subordination of women to male family members. The product of different attitudes, behaviors, and supporting discourses, the patrimonial construction emphasized the husband’s authority over his wife, as “her husband and guardian [man ende voogd].” It emphasized male, patrilineal control over property that women owned in the interests of preserving the patrimony for male heirs. Here is an act written in the patrimonial construction: Be it known that Jacob Trijl has bought . . . from Jan Trijl his brother, and from Joncvrouw Lijsbette, his legal wife, the land that is described here . . . in the parish of Eine. . . . And Joncvrouw Lijsbette, with the consent of Jan Trijl, her legal husband and guardian, has given up all her usufruct and rights that she might later claim from this land. . . .47

In this patrimonial act, Lijsbette’s consent had to be included in the sales contract to prevent her from claiming after Jan’s death that she had a right to usufruct on part of the property.48 The clerk specifically stated that she did this with the consent of her husband, who as her guardian controlled her legal act. The act exhibits a concern for proper forms, gender relationships, and land held under different types of tenure, which would stand up in any court.49 Even though Lijsbette appeared alongside her husband as a seller of the property, the patrimonial construction emphasizes that he was the active party in the transaction. In other contracts written in the patrimonial construction, men used their wives’ property without any expression of the wives’ consent.50 In some acts, husbands were explicitly named as guardians of their wives, in formulas like this one: “Clais Alverdoe in the name of and as guardian of my lady Agnees van Brakele, Lady of Sonnemare, his legal wife . . .”51

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 45

2/9/2011 12:37:26 PM

46

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

These acts express that the women owned the property, but it was controlled and managed by men, in line with the principle that husbands have control over their wives’ property. Presence of these patrimonial acts indicates that the aldermen’s clerks knew and used formulas that expressed the subordination of women, probably because they had received training in composing patrimonial acts for the comital feudal courts or ius commune legal forms.52 This practice also indicates that when the clerks employed egalitarian language from the burgher construction, they were not assuming or concealing male control over women’s actions. Both the patrimonial and burgher constructions were patriarchal; both maintained that a married woman was subject to her husband and that he should control the community property. Both constructions required individuals, male and female, to maintain family property and advance family interests. However, the burgher construction was an interpretation of the city of Ghent’s custom that emphasized preserving the rights of individuals to hold property, based on contracts and inheritance customs. Embued with the burgher construction, the mid-fourteenth-century aldermen and their clerks were mainly concerned with rightful ownership of property, adherence to contractual agreements, and preservation of peace and order; they were relatively unconcerned about preserving gender distinctions. They did not privilege or protect women, but rather treated women as they treated men in most cases. The burgher construction was f luid, f lexible, and less systematic. It allowed women more scope in economic activities and recognized the right of women, even married women, to manage their own property. In the burgher construction, families relied on women, as well as men, to preserve and transmit family property. By contrast, acts written in the patrimonial construction exhibit a distinct conceptualization of women’s roles in economic activities that accords with the more patriarchal provisions of the Coutume Homologuée and other normative sources. Women were passive carriers of wealth between families. Men acted for women, unless those women were widows. The authority of the husband over the wife was a primary concern. Patrimonial acts often exhibit a legalistic precision and elaboration to cover all eventualities in any of the neighboring and overlapping jurisdictions and courts of appeal.53 Although collateral family ties were important, the family was envisioned as a lineage and its property as “patrimony,” which should remain in the direct male line. In the mid-fourteenth century, the patrimonial mindset was decidedly a minority opinion. For every act that ref lects the patrimonial construction, there are ten acts written using the burgher construction. Similarly, even though the connection between high status and the patrimonial

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 46

2/9/2011 12:37:26 PM

47

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

construction is strong, many noble, patrician, and elite women (and men) employed the burgher construction for their economic acts, as Figure 2.2 shows. Four hundred ninety-one women acted in their own names in the 1580 economic acts in the aldermen’s registers from 1339 to 1361.54 Eight percent of them had patrician surnames, 17 percent had elite surnames, and 20 percent had surnames that were both patrician and elite.55 Some women can be tied directly to an elite male, or the circumstances in the act make it clear that they are definitely members of an elite or patrician family. For example, in an 1353 act, a Marie van den Kerchove granted a quit declaration to a Pieter van den Kerchove (a wine merchant and alderman), and one of her sureties was Gillis Rijnvisch, from a prominent patrician family.56 Since often there is no clear connection, some of the women with patrician or elite surnames probably did not belong to the patrician or elite branches of the family, or were completely unrelated. There is a Kateline Borluut, for example, in an act from 1360, but there is no context to indicate whether she belonged to the patrician Borluut family.57 Nevertheless, the extra cost of recording an act in the registers creates a bias towards the wealthy. An additional 16 percent of the women were identified by the title “ joncvrouw,” an indication that they were of at least middling status. One-third of the women cannot be assigned to any social group. The appearance of so many women from the most prominent families in the city shows that women who acted in their own names were not marginal in any way. In fact, like the ordinary, unexceptional

Women of Unknown Status 166 34%

Middling Women “Joncvrouwen” 81 16%

Noble Women 26 5%

Women with Patrician Surnames 37 8%

Women with Elite Surnames 85 17%

Women with Patrician and Elite Surnames 96 20%

Figure 2.2 Social Status of Women Who Acted in Their Own Names (Total = 491)

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 47

2/9/2011 12:37:27 PM

48

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

language used in the acts involving these women, the presence of women from the elite shows how acceptable and unremarkable the aldermen and other elite men found women’s legal and economic activity at all stages of their lives. Only 3 percent of the acts in the mid-fourteenth-century aldermen’s registers were written in the patrimonial system, but their existence shows that the burgher construction was not universally accepted. Competition between the two constructions must have produced a tension over women’s ownership and control of property in late medieval Ghent. Nevertheless, in the mid-fourteenth century, the majority of Ghentenars, including most of the elites, do not seem to have considered women’s economic activities to be unusual, threatening, or irregular. As Figure 2.3 shows, numbers in each of the categories of acts varied from

250 233 210

200

Numbers of Acts

160

150

147

109

100

90

94

76 62 55

50

39 38 21 21

0

24

8 7 7

14 15

13 20 12

Partial Registers 1339–1345 (163)

1349–50 (394)

1353–54 (305)

9

29 24

21 8

8

6

1357–58 (286)

1360–61 (432)

Extant Annual Registers of the Aldermen of the Keure (Total acts = 1580) Men Only Women in Their Own Names Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial)

Wives with Husbands Represented Women Women in More than One Category

Figure 2.3 Acts by Gender and Activity Level for Each Annual Register of the Aldermen of the Keure

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 48

2/9/2011 12:37:27 PM

49

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

year to year, but women consistently acted in their own names far more often than men acted for them. Continuity: Property and Legal Capability Although changes in a Ghent woman’s marital status were probably the most important changes in her social life, neither marital status nor lifecycle position determined the scope of her economic life. Instead of leading discontinuous economic lives, as gender historians have argued for English women, Ghent women followed relatively continuous economic lives.58 Figure 2.4 shows the distribution among the marital states of the women who acted in their own names. Two patterns in this distribution show that women’s economic lives were relatively continuous. First, women acted in their own names in each marital stage in reasonably close numbers. Thirteen percent were single, 16 percent were married, and 22 percent were widows. If marital status and lifecycle position determined a woman’s economic activity, we should see that most of the women acting in their own names were widows dealing with the estates and businesses of their late husbands. But, in fact, married and single women combined outnumbered widows.59 The second pattern is that the clerks did not even record the marital status of 45 percent of the women who acted in their own names. If marital status was the chief determinant of a woman’s right to act legally, or if the strictures of the Coutume Homologuée were in place, the aldermen and the

Widows 109 22%

Married 81 16%

Religious Mixed 12 9 2% 2%

Unknown 217 45%

Single 63 13%

Figure 2.4 Marital Status of Women Acting in Their Own Names (Total = 491)

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 49

2/9/2011 12:37:27 PM

50

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

clerks should have paid the same attention to marital status as they did to ownership and location of property. Instead, the principals, aldermen, and clerks did not consider it necessary to record the name of a male relative or a marital status for these women. Since it is now largely impossible to prove the marital status of these “unknown” women, the interpretations and assumptions that might be made are worth some extended analysis.60 One possibility is that these women were mainly widows, under the assumption that women actively managing property had to be widows because only widows had the legal rights and the financial resources to do so.61 According to this reasoning, these women could not be single, because single women, while legally capable, were too few and too poor, but widows managing their late husbands’ properties and businesses would have substantial resources. For mid-fourteenth-century Ghent, there are several problems with this assumption. The first is that the clerks paid close attention to the origin of the property in a contract or dispute. When a widow carried on her late husband’s business or managed property inherited from him, the clerks identified her as a widow and referred to the property as belonging to her late husband. The case of Aghate Hijssone, widow of Peter Sneewers, shows this. In 1353, she defended herself in a lawsuit launched by one of her late husband’s creditors. The clerk identified her only as “Pieter Sneewers’ widow,” and stated that Pieter had contracted the debt in question.62 In the second act, involving a dispute with Pauwels Sneewere (probably a relative), she is identified as “Aegte, Pieter Sneewers’ widow.”63 In an act of the same year from the annual registers of the aldermen of the Gedele, she appears as “Aghate, Pieter Hijssone’s daughter, Pieter Sneuwers’ widow.” Her father, Pieter Hijssone, and Jan Martin acknowledged that they owed her money as her portion of an inheritance and promised to pay her an annuity.64 In the first two acts, the clerks identified Aghate as Pieter Sneewers’ widow because Pieter’s debts and Pieter’s estate were the matters in dispute. In the third act, she was identified by her father’s name as well because that relationship was the basis for her claim against him. However, Aghate was also identified as a widow in the third act even when it was not necessary. In fact, the only consistent pieces of her identity among the three acts are her first name, her status as a widow, and her late husband’s name. Another problem with assuming that most of the women whose marital status is unknown were, in fact, widows is that many acts include both women identified as widows and women identified only by their own names, suggesting that the clerks were mindful of the differences.65 Since Flemish women did not commonly take their husbands’ surnames, the

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 50

2/9/2011 12:37:28 PM

51

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

unlabelled widow would have carried no marker at all of her widowed status or her late husband’s identity.66 If a widow was performing a legal act concerning her late husband’s property or community property without his name, the property would not be identified correctly. In addition, widowhood seems to have been a strong marker of identity for women themselves, as in the following case: Be it known to all that Jan Walraven in the Kwaadham and Mergriete van den Pale, his legal wife, have come before the aldermen . . . [and] declared that they have sold Joncvrouw Kateline van den Wallekijne, sir Jan van den Wallekijne’s widow, all the rights in the city lots that Mergriete inherited from lady Mergriete van Cleempitte, nun at Zwijneve [convent], who was her aunt. . . . 67

Because Kateline was buying the property from people apparently unrelated to her late husband, there was no reason to identify her as a widow. This is likely how Kateline either was identified by others or how she identified herself. The label of “widow” and the late husband’s name seems to have been a powerful element of a widow’s identity. A few of the women whose marital status is unknown may have been widows, particularly widows who had come into Ghent after the death of their husbands, were never publicly identified by their husbands’ names, and were managing property of their own or from their own families. When women possessed charters, like Beatrise Blanckaerds’ authorization to collect debts, the aldermen and their clerks might have considered that charter combined with the woman’s name was sufficient identification. Others of these women may have been married independent merchants, a group that would later be formally classified as “female public merchants” [coopwijven]. When women were managing their own property, their marital status and the names of their male relatives were less important. One example comes from a 1361 dispute between Jan Vogheleest and Beatrice van Buxelaer over a piece of land [ervachtecheden]: Be it known to all that in the dispute that was between Jan Vogheleest on the one side and Beatrice van Buxelaer on the other side, over the piece of land and the profit from it, that he was claiming from her . . . [He said that] it belonged to him. Against this Beatrise said that she bought and received the same land in the past and that she had held it in peaceful possession for twenty-five years and more. He agreed to abide by her oath. If she dared to swear that she had brought and received the same land without deceit and had held it as long a time as she said, he would let her use it peacefully. She accepted this proposal and gave out her oath, [and] as a result, Jan, as

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 51

2/9/2011 12:37:28 PM

52

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

he promised, gave up his claim to the land and let Beatrice use it peacefully, like her own property.68

The procedure of daring Beatrice to swear was a provision in the Ghent custom for establishing the truth, and it held serious risks for Beatrice if she was lying. In this case, a woman’s oath held enough weight for the aldermen to uphold both her word and her subsequent right to the land.69 Beatrice stated that she had bought the land more than twenty-five years before, rather than inheriting it or receiving it from a late husband’s estate. Her claim to the property was probably legally shaky, because she clearly did not have a chirograph to prove her ownership. Perhaps the sale had been performed orally, or perhaps she bought the property from someone who did not have the right to sell it. However, she was able to prove to the aldermen’s and the community’s satisfaction that she thought she was the owner of the property and she had possessed it for a long time, because her oath was not challenged. The clerks identified her by her first and last name because of her ownership of the property, and probably because this was how she was publicly known. In contrast to the common assumption of widowhood, I argue that Beatrice van Buxelaer and most of the women whose marital status is unknown were probably single. There was a substantial population of single women in Ghent, including women who never married and those who delayed marriage, as well as a large population of beguines.70 Although the majority of single women were poor immigrants who worked at spinning and combing, middling and elite single women inherited sizeable amounts of property through partible inheritance. They possessed full legal capability and the financial means to pay for the recording of their most important economic acts in the aldermen’s registers. No membership lists from the fourteenth century have survived for any of the Ghent beguinages, but some beguines can be identified from donation chirographs copied into a surviving cartulary of St. Elizabeth’s Beguinage in Ghent. Using language virtually identical to that of acts in the aldermen’s registers, the clerk recording acts for the beguinage identified Kateline Tieselincs by her own name alone in one charter, but by both her name and title, Grand Mistress (equivalent to an abbess), in a second act.71 It is possible that other beguines were identified by their names alone in acts recorded in the annual registers. While the marital status of 45 percent of all women who acted in their own names remains speculative, their lack of marital status and male identifiers highlights an inescapable conclusion—they could act independently of male control as owners and managers of their property. These acts were legal documents that had to contain the information

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 52

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

53

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

the aldermen of the Keure considered essential to the legality of the act. To the aldermen and their clerks, the marital status of these women was ultimately irrelevant, a strong indication that marital status did not determine the economic activities of women in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. The high percentage of acts with these “unknown” women is a powerful indicator of the continuity of women’s economic lives. Another striking statistic from Figure 2.4 is that eighty-one married women performed public economic acts. Since one possibility is that these women were mislabeled widows, I attempted to verify the marital status of each of the twenty-six married women who acted in their own names in the 1349–50 annual register through prosopographical analysis.72 In thirteen cases, I found conclusive proof that the husband was still alive at the time of the act or afterwards, either from internal references to his presence in the act itself, or by corroborating evidence from other sources. Given the general sparsity of evidence, this result weighs heavily in favor of accepting the other records as accurate. When married women acted in their own names, the clerks almost never included a formula giving the husbands’ consent. For example, in April 1350, the aldermen ordered two men to pay three pounds groot to Jehane, wife of Boudin Dullaerds, with no further comment.73 Married women made loans from their own personal property, sometimes indicated by the formula “on her and all her property” [up haer ende up al thare]: Be it known to all that Joncvrouw Alise van der Pale, legal wife of Gillis van der Pale, came before the aldermen . . . [and] declared that she owed a legal debt of eight pounds groot to Robrecht van Eeke. She promised to pay this on her and all her property by the next St. John’s mass without any fraud or trickery.74

Alise van der Pale was borrowing a substantial sum of money by herself and without any statement of authorization from her husband. Gillis van der Pale was still alive, as an act dated later in 1350 proves.75 Alise contracted the debt in her own name and promised to pay it back using her own property, rather than encumbering community property. For the aldermen, her ownership of the property, not her gender, was the decisive factor. Managing personal property and the investments based on it throughout the different stages of their lives gave women experience and made their economic lives continuous. For example, in 1358, Kateline Rijnvisch, the daughter of Clais Rijnvisch (from a prominent patrician family), sued Jan van den Bossche for arrears on a hereditary annuity

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 53

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

54

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

she had purchased from Arend Boelaer more than twenty years before.76 A Kateline Rijnvisch, probably but not definitely the same woman, appeared in the same year in a second act, in which the clerk identified her not only as the daughter of Clais, but also as the wife of Lievin van Hoerdeghem.77 She and her sister, both married women with their husbands, authorized the transfer of a hereditary annuity from one property to another. The act makes clear that the women were the owners of the property (inherited from their father), and the clerk identified them as “the Joncvrouwen sisters and their husbands.”78 As the reversal suggests, in this management of patrician family property, the wives, as owners and transmitters, were more essential to the legal act than their husbands. Furthermore, Kateline Rijnvisch had been managing her personal property for twenty years. Perhaps she had bought the first hereditary annuity as a single woman, and then after her marriage continued to manage that investment by hauling the delinquent debtor into court. There is no extra explanation or statement of permission from her husband. The aldermen, thirteen men chosen from the city’s patricians and guild elites, and ruling on behalf of the corporations they represented, easily gave married women a de facto legal capability if they were owners of the property at stake. The aldermen probably verified orally that the women’s husbands were in agreement, and certainly if a husband objected, his wife’s action would have been invalid, or at least hindered. But what is so striking in these acts is the utter absence of explanation or controversy. Embedded in the mid-fourteenth-century acts written in the burgher construction is a discourse about women and economic activities. In the burgher discourse, the wife, as the real owner of her personal property, had the right to be involved in decisions about that property and all economic activities that might f low from the investment of that property. Elite men did not automatically regard women’s activity as a threat to their male authority. They seem to have thought that women ought to understand how to manage property well, because preservation of the household could easily come to rest on their shoulders at any time. Women had the potential to make good economic decisions, and could be trusted with money, business, and ordinary legal acts. The expectation was that women would act for the benefit of their households and families, an expectation that most women seem to have fulfilled. Nevertheless, the aldermen probably deployed the patriarchal controls in the custom if a woman’s act did not conform with their vision of responsible activity. Their casual tolerance could evaporate if an act originally performed according to the burgher construction became fraught with political overtones. When this happened, a women could “disappear” from legal capacity and mention in the documents, as a series of

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 54

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

55

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

acts from 1349–50 shows. Beatrise Bloemen originally appeared before the aldermen alone, representing herself in a dispute with a nobleman over property she had inherited. The nobleman, in return, sued her husband over the same property, and as the dispute acquired serious political dimensions, her name ceased to be mentioned and only the men appeared as legal actors. The aldermen judged the original case using the burgher construction, but the final act is an example of the patrimonial construction. In the initial act, Beatrise Bloemen appeared alone before the aldermen defending herself against Jan Westrem, the bailiff of Gherard van Massemine, a local noble. Westrem challenged Beatrise’s right to property that her father, Ghiselbrecht van Coleghem, had given to Beatrise and her brother Ghiseline. The Ghent aldermen were more impressed by Beatrise’s claim and awarded the property to her.79 Four months later, Gherard van Massemine himself appeared before the aldermen, challenging this decision because it did not follow the custom of his seigneury, a rural manor with its own custom. Rather than suing Beatrise herself, Gherard sued his “servant” [dienstman], Clais van Oterghem, and Beatrise Bloemen, his wife. Gherard claimed that the couple left his manor and brought the case before the Ghent aldermen improperly.80 Whether Clais and Beatrise were married at the time that Beatrise originally appeared before the aldermen is impossible to determine. What is clear is that Gherard van Massemine was determined to deal not with her but with her husband. The aldermen delivered their decision in just one week, as follows: Be it known to all that in the dispute between Gherard van Massemine on one side and Clais van Oterghem on the other side, over a certain property, land, movable and immovable, coming from [the estate of ] Ghiseline uten Bloemen, the aldermen of the Keure in the city of Ghent order . . . that Clais pay Gherard . . . thirteen shillings and six pence groot. . . .81

There is no mention of Beatrise, even though the property was hers, inherited from her father and brother. The disappearance of the woman probably resulted from the fact that the case had become more important, involving higher issues of jurisdiction and the relations between the city government and a prominent local nobleman.82 The burgher construction and its champions, the aldermen of the Keure, allowed women the same opportunities, responsibilities, and liabilities as men, but only within a limited realm. The following series of acts shows the firmest of those limits, that women were not to assume positions of authority over men. In 1339, Mergriete van Menine sued Marie, the widow of Symoen Rijm, for 175 gold pennies, apparently

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 55

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

56

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

arising from a debt incurred by Brame Rijm, also deceased. Mergriete won the case and was awarded the use of Brame’s and Symoen’s property, now the property of Marie and her children, up to the value of the debt itself, until the widow could repay the debt entirely.83 At this point, the matter appears routine and noncontroversial. By 1345, Brame Rijm’s debts were still outstanding, and his creditors went before the aldermen to appoint three of their number as receivers [ontfanghers], empowered to take stock of Rijm’s property and pay each debtor the amount he or she was owed. They also appointed two supervisors to oversee the operation; one of the supervisors was male, and the other was Mergriete van Menine. Appointment of a non-noble woman to a position of authority over men was highly unusual. The act includes an explanation for her appointment: “. . . the good people have made Joncvrouw Mergriete van Menine supervisor for the reason that she has a pronouncement [from a previous judgment] about that, as is included in the aldermen’s book, of which she has her copy. . . .”84 The inclusion of such an explanation, while there was none for the appointment of the male receivers or supervisor, shows that the aldermen and the parties recognized the unusual nature of this appointment, and suggests that they were forced, somewhat disapprovingly, to appoint her because of the terms of the pronouncement. The language also suggests that Mergriete herself argued for her appointment, carrying her chirograph copy of the pronouncement to the aldermen and insisting upon her rights. This exceptional case marks a real boundary around the sphere of economic and legal activity allowed to Ghent women. Women could be participants and as such enjoy equal privileges and rights as men, but they were not supposed to assume positions of power. Mergriete’s appointment was clearly a problematic exception to that rule, and, significantly, it is the only one of its kind. In the same way, Beatrise Bloemen’s gender became a factor as her inheritance dispute assumed political importance. The boundaries drawn in these cases also accentuate the lack of gender discrimination in other lawsuits. The burgher construction allowed a relatively open space for women to exercise management of property they owned. Because the aldermen were most concerned with upholding the rights of ownership of property and the importance of honoring contracts, they supported and maintained this open space for women within firm patriarchal boundaries. In comparison to these contentious disputes, it was far more typical for women to act as Beatrise Blanckaerds did, in cooperation with male relatives to further family or household strategies. Inheritance was partible and spread out vertically rather than in a patrilineal pattern. Many married women who acted in their own names were cooperating with

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 56

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

57

AC T I V I T Y A N D CON T I N U I T Y

their husbands rather than pursuing independent economic activities. An example comes from two 1350 acts. On 28 July 1350, the aldermen’s clerk recorded the agreement of Symoen de Necker, himself an alderman of the Keure, and his wife, Lijsbette van Sotteghem, settling a dispute with a woman named Lente Moelges over a house. The act makes clear that the two claimants to the house were Lijsbette and Lente.85 Five days later, Lijsbette van Sotteghem and Lente Moelges went together, without Symoen de Necker, to the aldermen to complete the transfer of ownership according to the agreement redacted on 28 July. The language of the act reads: Ver Lijsbette van Sottegem, wife of ser Symoen de Necker, and Lente Moelges came before the aldermen, because of the peace [agreement they had] made, to remove her [Lente] from the ownership of the house and to give it to ver Lijsbette . . .86

While Symoen was clearly knowledgeable about the case, and surely in accord with his wife’s activities, the fact is that Lijsbette went alone before the aldermen and performed this legal act. Neither the aldermen, the clerk, nor Symoen himself felt it was necessary to state that he had granted his wife permission. This case points to the prevalence of the burgher construction and its cultural understanding of married women and economic activities. Symoen de Necker could have stopped his wife’s activities had he wished to. But he did not do so, because he probably did not view his wife’s activities as a threat to his male authority. Symoen involved himself in the initial agreement, and perhaps he and Lijsbette discussed the situation and developed the settlement strategy together. When Lijsbette went with Lente to the aldermen’s chamber, she went to carry out the strategy of the married couple. She was not so much her husband’s deputy as his partner, and neither the aldermen nor their clerks thought that was unusual enough to require explanation. Conclusion Lijsbette acted to carry out the couple’s strategy, just as Beatrise Blanckaerds acted on behalf of her kinsman Ghiselbrecht. Women’s activity on behalf of family and in cooperation with men was a critical support for the burgher construction of women’s economic roles. Women of means owned personal property and had a role in managing that property throughout their lives, for their own benefit but also for the benefit of the family. Ghentenars recognized the potential of women to make good economic choices and to carry out strategies they had discussed, planned, and

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 57

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

58

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

negotiated with family members, just as they expected men to act in the family’s interest. When women appeared before the aldermen to perform legal acts, the aldermen did not favor women so much as they treated women like men, within clear limits. However, the burgher construction was not universally accepted. Those acts that ref lect the patrimonial construction limited—or eliminated—women’s management of property by reserving it for husbands and male kinsmen. Even though they amount to only 3 percent of all mid-fourteenth-century acts, those patrimonial acts foreshadow the extensive restrictions of the sixteenth-century Coutume Homologuée. The predominance of the f lexible and tolerant burgher construction meant that the Coutume Homologuée’s insistence that married women were legally incapable was not thoroughly in force in the fourteenth century. The access of women to a role in property management throughout their adult years gave their economic lives continuity. The economic life of a woman and her ability to manage wealth was not something that began when she became a widow, but something that developed as she acquired age and experience, something less dependent on her marital status and more dependent on her individual desires, skills, and circumstances. The result was that women not only owned substantial property, but also played a major role in managing and investing that wealth in Ghent’s commercial economy.

9780230104952_04_ch02.indd 58

2/9/2011 12:37:29 PM

CHAPTER 3 “HER AND ALL HER PROPERTY”: GENDER AND PROPERTY TRANSACTIONS

I

n 1360 Clementie Tsuul appeared before the aldermen to register an agreement she had made with her two sons to divide the family property.1 In it she explained the provisions that her husband and she together, and later she as a widow alone, had made for their four daughters. Ogier Tsuul, her husband, was still alive in 1336 when the first daughter, also named Clementie, was married, and the parents gave her “land and other property” worth forty pounds groot.2 When Ogier died, “friends of the children” had asked the younger Clementie if she wanted to have a share of her father’s property, in which case she would have to “bring in what she had taken away.”3 The daughter Clementie declined, suggesting that forty pounds was a fair approximation of her share of her father’s estate. In 1341, the widow Clementie placed her second daughter Kateline as a nun in the convent of Waasmunster and gave her “household furnishings and other property taken out of the common nest” worth twenty pounds groot.4 The third daughter Zoetin married in the same year, and Clementie gave her “city lots and money” worth forty pounds groot.5 The last daughter, Alleene, married in 1353, and Clementie gave her “city lots, chattels and money” also worth forty pounds groot.6 All three married daughters received the same amount of property, and significantly, each received some immovable and some movable property. The movable part of the marriage gift—the “other property,” the money and the chattels—became community property, which was jointly owned but under the husband’s control during the marriage.7 But the land and the city lots became the daughters’ personal property, giving them some measure of control. Clementie then explained that her sons, Ogier and Mathijs, had helped her increase the property and turn a profit, a clear indication that

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 59

2/9/2011 12:37:08 PM

60

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

the three had worked together to manage the extensive family holdings. Now, she dictated, each wished to have his own share and operate alone.8 Clementie retained usufruct of about one-third of the properties divided between her sons, kept a house and lot in the city and a few assets, clearly less than the three-fourths she was granted by custom. Although mediated through a clerk, Clementie’s statements offer insight into the thoughts and plans of a woman whose marriage was an economic partnership, followed by a long and economically active widowhood. She did not engage in independent economic activity, in the sense of a separate business that she operated for her own profit apart from the family business. Her economic activity was thoroughly embedded in a family strategy for preservation and extension of family property. Clementie viewed the property as “the common nest,” a stock phrase, but revealing nevertheless.9 She described her activity as the implementation of a plan she and her late husband had devised together to provide an equitable financial foundation for all the children. She was concerned to keep control of enough of the property to maintain herself in proper style, but not interested in retaining control of all she was entitled to by custom. At the same time, she did not regard herself as a subordinate or dependent of her husband, and certainly not of her sons. Instead, she describes herself as a partner, working with them to make important family decisions.10 The most common choice of married women and widows with children was this partnership role, a voice in economic decision making for the benefit of “the common nest.” The burgher construction was founded on the expectation that women would act in the family’s interests, and most women fulfilled that expectation. Clementie’s narrative highlights the fact that ownership of property and public performance were the crucial elements that enabled Ghent women to act economically. When a woman from a prosperous family married, her parents gave her immovable property that remained in her possession in addition to movable property that went into the marital community fund. Under the burgher construction, at all stages of her life a woman had a right to manage her personal property and to pledge it as collateral for debts and other obligations made “by her and on all her property” [up hare ende up al thare]. However, a woman had to claim that right by public performance. Orality and performance in public space were integral parts of most political and economic acts in medieval Flanders.11 The acts copied into the Ghent aldermen’s registers were brief records of public oral transactions, performed by individuals and groups who appeared, spoke, authorized acts, and swore oaths before an audience of aldermen, clerks, interested parties, and onlookers. Some wives performed acts along with their husbands when there was no legal

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 60

2/9/2011 12:37:08 PM

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

61

requirement for consent, evidence of economic partnership in marriage. Other wives performed acts alone, and only rarely did the clerk record that they had permission from their husbands. Instead, the performance itself seems to have been the crucial element in determining legal capability.12 If a married woman appeared alone, the aldermen allowed her to manage her personal property, and sometimes even community property. Conversely, if a wife did not appear, the aldermen would allow her husband to manage her property without question, unless he was trying to sell it. Whether a Ghent woman publicly performed property management depended on three factors: her choice, external pressures, and negotiation with others. A woman’s choice was likely inf luenced by her talents, skills, age, experience, and her internal reaction to hegemonic discourses. Women’s choices spread along a continuum between the two extremes of total passivity and completely independent activity. Women could aggressively pursue investment opportunities, use the property to finance their own businesses, or employ a more conservative strategy of maintaining what property they already held. Using money and property they inherited from their families of origin or earned by labor, many women chose to buy and sell in the urban real estate market. Even larger numbers of women invested in annuities, one of the primary credit and investment tools of late medieval Ghent. Exercising these choices helped develop a woman’s ability to manage property and invest profitably (hopefully, at least), giving continuity to her economic life. At the other extreme, women could also opt for a passive role, as in the patrimonial construction, and let their husbands or male relatives handle property management. They also experienced continuity in their economic lives, as passivity bred lack of experience and knowledge. There were considerable pressures on women’s choices from external forces, life circumstances, and patriarchal constraints. A woman’s choices were predicated on the amount and type of property she inherited from her own family. External market forces dictated returns on investments. As these pressures affected men as well, a propertied woman, in many ways, had more freedom of choice than a poorer man.13 Absence and death of male family members forced some women to perform management publicly despite their wishes.14 The early death of Clementie’s husband left her with five children, most still minors, and forced her into a leadership role she may not have wanted. Although widowhood might have meant economic empowerment to some women, to others, it meant financial loss and increased stress.15 In addition, patriarchal constraints reserved certain sectors of the economy, such as the rural real estate market, for elite men.16

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 61

2/9/2011 12:37:08 PM

62

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Women’s relations with male family members on property matters were usually negotiations, even though some women were undoubtedly forced to turn over all management to their husbands who insisted on patrimonial rights. In practice, few married women completely surrendered their rights to play a role in the management of their personal property. Most Ghent men followed the burgher construction, allowing and supporting their wives’ active involvement in management of both personal and community property. Each married couple had to negotiate the balance of authority over decision making themselves, and in most cases doubtless the husband’s voice was dominant. However, as Clementie’s story shows, a married woman could at any time be left a widow, fully responsible for her husband’s debts and family property.17 It was in a husband’s best interests to inform and include his wife in decision making. Because her involvement was expected under the burgher construction, he did not risk social disapproval if his wife performed public legal acts to manage property, as long as those acts were routine and relatively unimportant. Women also had to negotiate with family members. Although elite parents probably did not negotiate much with their children, they often sent their daughters to basic schools so that they would be literate.18 It is possible that they also trained daughters to manage property. High mortality meant that the average Ghent woman would be either single or widowed for long periods of her life, and during that time, she would hold and control “family” property. One of the guiding principles of the Ghent inheritance custom was that property originating from one “side” [zijde] of the family should return to that side of the family when the current holder died. If a holder died without children, family members inherited the property through strict divisions that calculated the origin of property back to the grandparents or even great-grandparents of the holder.19 Since a woman’s family had to rely on her to preserve property she inherited for family heirs, preparing a daughter to be an economic partner of her husband was in her family’s best interests. Even though adult unmarried women, like men, technically did not have to negotiate with family members, they probably consulted certain family members and trusted friends over every property decision. A group identified as “friends and relatives” [vrienden en magen] appears in some of the acts and was undoubtedly more active behind the scenes, giving advice, criticism, and/or support that affected a woman’s choice of action and her public behavior.20 Negotiation over property management was likely an unseen backdrop to every economic act in the aldermen’s registers. Another largely unseen negotiation took place between women acting in their own names and the aldermen. 21 Most often, these thirteen

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 62

2/9/2011 12:37:09 PM

63

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

men from the patrician and guild elite groups seem to have regarded women’s acts as routine. However, they had the power to assist or block women whose claims to perform legal acts approached the boundaries around the sphere of activities allotted to women under the burgher construction. There would be no evidence of these blocked acts in the aldermen’s registers. It is worth noting that the aldermen exercised the same negotiation with men, although their scrutiny of women may have been more stringent. Negotiation with the aldermen, husbands, and family members had a critical impact on women’s performance of property management, along with external pressures and choice. Property-related acts (mainly sales contracts and lawsuits) in the aldermen’s registers reveal the extent of women’s public performance of property management. Sixty-two percent of the sales contracts for all types of property include at least one woman (see Figure 3.1).22 Almost one-quarter feature a woman buying or selling property in her own name. Wives performed sales with their husbands in forty-four acts, a stark contrast to the eighteen acts in which men acted for women. The burgher construction (with 126 contracts) was much more predominant than the patrimonial construction (with 16 contracts).23 However, since the absolute number of men is greater than the absolute number of women, many

Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial) 9 4%

Women in More Than One Category 28 12% Men Only 86 38%

Represented Women 9 4%

Women in Their Own Names 52 23%

Wives with Husbands 44 19%

Figure 3.1 Gender and Activity Status in Sales Contracts (Total = 228)

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 63

2/9/2011 12:37:09 PM

64

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

men were managing community property alone with no mention of their represented wives. The aldermen did insist that wives consent to the sale of their personal property. In 1350, the noble Jan van Hoysy, who was selling a city lot and house owned by his wife, had to promise the aldermen that he would bring her to the city so that “they both could perform the sale,” suggesting that mere reporting of her consent was not sufficient.24 Wives may also have been included in sales of property because they were co-owners of community property and their public agreement helped ensure against future lawsuits. Another type of public performance involved lawsuits over property. Lawsuits featured a much higher percentage of men acting alone (see Figure 3.2).25 There is a sharp decrease in wives and husbands performing together, because there was no legal requirement for a woman’s consent and less need to protect against future lawsuits, either before the Ghent aldermen or in competing court systems. Since there was no legal requirement that a husband needed his wife’s consent to engage in a lawsuit over either community or personal property, those wives and husbands who brought or answered lawsuits together were performing as economic partners, as were Everaerd van den Winkele and his unnamed wife in this act from 1354: Be it known that [there was a] dispute between Everaerd van den Winkele and his wife on one side and Jan Oerneke as legal guardian in place of Lelie

Represented Women 4 2%

Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial) 7 3%

Women in More Than One Category 14 7%

Women in Their Own Names 57 28%

Wives with Husbands 19 9%

Figure 3.2

Men Only 101 51%

Gender and Activity Status in Property Lawsuits (Total = 202)

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 64

2/9/2011 12:37:10 PM

65

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

Berevelts on the other side, over a piece of property that Lelie inherited from Lijsbette sBlasers, wife of Jan Bliec, which Everaerd and his wife had seized, as Jan Oerneke said and showed. The aldermen . . . [considering] what Everaerd and his wife said . . . [and other testimony, ordered] that they should give Jan Oerneke on Lelie’s behalf any property that she inherited from Lijsbette sBlasers. And if Everaerd and his wife are claiming something from Jan Oerneke in the name of Lelie that each will have what he is entitled to.26

This act and the twenty-seven additional acts in which wives and husbands are consistently named together as lawsuit principals offer solid evidence of marriage as an economic partnership. Even if the husband’s voice was dominant, the wife was present and included in the performance, which would give her experience managing property.27 Twenty-eight percent of the lawsuits feature women acting in their own names. The marital status of most is unknown, as they were identified only by name, a sign that they were managing their own property, earned or inherited from their families (see Figure 3.3).28 Less than one-third of the seventy-nine women bringing or answering lawsuits in their own names were identified as widows. Unless the clerk identified a woman by her late husband’s name, she was probably not managing property inherited from a deceased husband.

40 35

38

30 25 20

22

15 10 9

8

5

2

0 Unknown

Married

Widowed

Single

Religious

Figure 3.3 Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names in Lawsuits (Total = 79)

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 65

2/9/2011 12:37:10 PM

66

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

A few married women appeared alone before the aldermen to bring or answer a lawsuit, most with no explanation or empowerment from their husbands. Instead, the married woman’s performance sufficed to give her legal capability for the specific case.29 When a man challenged a woman’s ownership of property, the aldermen often judged in the woman’s favor.30 In 1353, Boudin Dullaerds claimed a house from Mergriete Medemans, who used documents and witnesses to prove that she owned the house, Boudin had rented it from her, and furthermore, he owed her back rent. The aldermen threw out his challenge, confirmed Mergriete as the owner, and ordered Boudin to pay the arrears in rent.31 A third type of property act, the bequest, was problematic for both women and men, because the custom of Ghent put serious constraints on alienating property from customary heirs.32 Women’s bequests often reveal their concern for the “common nest,” particularly if they had living children. Other women, especially those without living children, directed their bequests to persons outside their immediate family. Some widows gave part or all of their property to a younger relative but retained use of it until they died.33 A few noted that the gift was for services, which was probably their way of paying for care in their old age. 34 A single woman, Mergriete van den Bossche, gave all her property to two monks, who then gave it back to her to use for her lifetime.35 Other women (and men) made mutual bequests of their property to each other. In 1354, Trune Beyerix and Alijse sRueden pronounced each other heirs of all their property.36 The contract stipulated that the longest living of the two would possess the property of the other after her debts were paid, and after her death, the property of both would go to the family heirs. In other bequests, women were trying to provide for their own maintenance and for those people who were closest to them, an alternative “common nest”; certain nieces or nephews, friends or perhaps live-in lovers, priests or monks. These women chose to direct their property away from relatives towards the network of individuals who had taken the place of their families.37 Their actions could have resulted in the alienation of property from the family, something neither the patrimonial nor burgher construction supported. In addition to management of inherited property, women and men bought and sold property as investments, or used the equity and/or income from property to buy annuities or invest in other economic ventures. In modern terms, there were three property markets in fourteenthcentury Ghent: urban real estate (city lots, houses, businesses), rural real estate (manors held in fief, agricultural land, forests, peat moors), and annuities (hereditary and liferent annuities). 38 The gendered pattern of

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 66

2/9/2011 12:37:11 PM

67

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

investment in these three markets shows the possibilities available to a woman of means and the limitations placed on her access to investment opportunities. What women chose to buy was not only a ref lection of their own preferences, but also an indication of which investment opportunities, markets, and sectors of the economy were open to women’s economic activity. Figure 3.4 shows the pattern of investments in the three property markets, but it does not include all transactions involving property. It excludes all acts that involve only chattels, clothing, and household items, which are not primarily investments, or the generic term “property” [goed].39 The figure shows that men predominated in the urban real estate market, but women in their own names and wives with husbands were also common participants. In the annuities market, wives and husbands and women in their own names bought and sold as often as men did. The rural real estate market was overwhelmingly dominated by men, and markedly few women participated in it, with or without husbands. One

40 36 35 30

30

24

25 20

18

18

17

18

15 10

9

10

8

9

5 5

5

5 1

2

2 2

0 Urban Real Estate (91)

Annuities (66)

Rural Real Estate (62)

Men Only

Wives with Husbands

Women in Their Own Names

Represented Women

Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial)

Women in More than One Category

Figure 3.4 Gender and Activity Status in Acts by Property Market (Total = 219)

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 67

2/9/2011 12:37:11 PM

68

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

notable pattern is that in each of the markets, the numbers of acts with women in their own names and husband-and-wife economic partnerships are closely aligned. If few wives performed contracts with their husbands, few women performed in their own names, and vice versa. This pattern suggests that when a market was open to women, husbands often included their wives (or wives often included their husbands) in the process of investigating opportunities, visiting properties, negotiating with other parties, and registering the sales contract. The marital status of women who bought and sold in their names in each of the three markets also reveals which markets were open to them (see Figure 3.5). Another important factor is whether women were selling or buying the property. The predominance of widow sellers indicates that women’s involvement in a market is likely limited to widows selling their late husbands’ property for cash to pay debts or to purchase a more liquid investment. As Figure 3.5 shows, widows selling property predominated in the rural real estate market.40 The urban property market shows a more even distribution among single women, married women, widows, and women whose marital status is unknown, but most of these women were selling property.41 Many of these sales were related to inheritances and involved multiple family members grouping together to sell their one-quarter or one-eighth portions of houses and city lots.42 While women clearly participated in the urban property market at all stages of their lives, it was not a major investment market for them. By contrast, in the annuities market, two-thirds of women in their own names were buyers, and they were present in all marital states.43 14 12

Unknown Married Widowed Single Religious

13 12 12 11 10

10

8

8 6

6 5

5

4

3

2

3

1 0

0

Urban Real Estate (40)

0 Annuities (35)

0

Rural Real Estate (14)

Figure 3.5 Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names by Property Market (Total = 89)

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 68

2/9/2011 12:37:12 PM

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

69

Considered socially prestigious and safer than other investments, annuities, or rents, were major investment opportunities for elites in late medieval cities.44 Annuities were also important credit tools that generated capital for entrepreneurial ventures, housing construction, and new commercial enterprises.45 There were two forms: a liferent annuity [lijfrent] ceased when the owner died, and a hereditary annuity [erfrent] passed on to the owner’s heirs and remained payable for two or three generations.46 Annuities provided property owners with a method of raising cash, similar to a modern second mortgage. If a woman owned a house or a piece of land to use as collateral, she could sell an annuity for a large amount of cash. The seller would then have to pay the buyer a certain amount every year. If the seller failed to make these annuity payments, the buyer could seize the property. Although most annuity contracts did not specify the price, the interest rate on liferent annuities was 6 to 8 percent per annum, and double that on hereditary annuities.47 After hereditary annuities were contracted, they could be inherited or sold to third parties. Buying annuities was a way to invest capital at a profitable interest rate and obtain a steady and secure annual income. Mothers, fathers, and other family members often purchased liferent annuities for religious sons or daughters.48 Husbands and wives together purchased annuities from community property, probably as a type of old-age insurance.49 Single women of means also purchased annuities, which would provide them with a steady income so that they could either live as rentiers or combine that income with earnings from work. In 1339, Lijsbette van der Eeke, as a single woman, sold a small piece of peat moor to a man for a liferent of six shillings groot.50 Ten years later, after the aldermen had confiscated the property of the buyer of the moor for his misdeeds, the same Lijsbette van der Eeke presented her chirograph to the aldermen and secured their order that her annuity should be paid from the buyer’s property.51 Women’s focus on annuities shows that this market was an attractive investment opportunity for them. This in itself is not surprising, because historians have often noted elite women owning and living off the proceeds of annuities in late medieval and early modern Europe, but usually the implication is that men were buying annuities for women (fathers for daughters, husbands for wives, etc.).52 However, the Ghent evidence clearly shows that many women were buying annuities for themselves and that the “families” buying for others were often either husband-andwife partnerships or mothers alone. The annuities market was a popular investment option for any women, single, married, or widowed, who possessed enough wealth to buy them. Women’s investments in annuities circulated their wealth through the economy, promoting commercial

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 69

2/9/2011 12:37:12 PM

70

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

growth and enabling capital formation, just as dowries circulated women’s wealth in other pre-modern cities.53 The difference in Ghent was that women were investing, managing, and circulating their own wealth. By buying annuities (and by loaning money, as we will see in the next chapter), women put their wealth into circulation in Ghent’s commercial economy. In contrast, women were largely excluded from the most profitable property investment market, sales and leases of rural real estate, especially peat moors. This market was dominated by men from noble, patrician, and urban elite groups, and most ordinary men were excluded from it as well.54 In the annual registers from 1339 through 1361, there were thirtyfive lease contracts for rural real estate, controlled predominantly by patrician, elite, and noble men. Only three leases were made by women, all of whom were widows. Two were noble, and the status of the third is unknown.55 No women took out rural land in a lease. Most of the leases involved peat, a highly profitable commodity. In 1354, for example, Volcwijf van Varnewijc (from a noble family), widow of Willem van der Lake, sold the right to extract peat from a plot of moor land for sixty-seven pounds groot, the equivalent of nine years’ salary for a master mason.56 The expense and difficulty of exploitation may have discouraged women from investing in peat moor leases. Nevertheless, the lack of women’s involvement in this market and the lack of men of lower social status, is, I argue, the sign of a more active exclusion. Men from patrician and other elite groups reserved for themselves the most profitable economic opportunities, such as sales and leases of rural land. Similarly, these elite men did not publicly include their wives in their transactions in the rural real estate market, as men (elite and otherwise) often did in the urban real estate and annuities markets. The global patterns of women’s management and investment activities in the three property markets show that many women performed property management at all stages of their adult lives. Although constrained by external pressures and subject to negotiation with others, Ghent women had a range of choices, which spread along a continuum from the extreme of completely independent activity to the opposite extreme of complete passivity and dependence on male activity. Clementie Tsuul, whose act opens this chapter, chose to operate close to the middle of the continuum. The next section examines the choices of two women at the opposing extremes of the continuum. These two women appear in the same series of documents concerning the largest inheritance case in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. Lijsbette, the remarried widow, chose to manage her economic interests herself without any apparent assistance from her new husband, while Kateline, the married daughter, chose

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 70

2/9/2011 12:37:12 PM

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

71

(or was forced) to let her husband manage all her property by himself. Positioned as they were at the extremes of the continuum, neither woman was typical (although neither was unique). Extreme Choices: Lijsbette van Lierde and Kateline de Mirabello Lijsbette (or Isabelle) van Lierde, Lady of Zomergem, and her stepdaughter, Kateline de Mirabello, were probably the wealthiest and most prominent women in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. Lijsbette, illegitimate sister of the Flemish Count Louis of Nevers, was the widow of one of the foremost Flemings of the mid-fourteenth century, Simon de Mirabello or van Halen.57 After Simon’s family emigrated from Lombardy to Brabant at the beginning of the fourteenth century, they established a banking firm with branches in the major Flemish cities, and soon become wealthy. By extending loans to nobles, they soon acquired property and wealth. Simon, son of Jean de Mirabello, ran the Ghent branch of the family banking house and acted as lender, financier, tax farmer, and receiver for the Flemish count.58 Simon’s marriage to Lijsbette in 1324 gave him noble status and even closer connections to the court. Simon remained in the service of Louis of Nevers from 1323 until 1338, but also served as the agent of Edward III of England and loaned this king vast sums of money for the opening campaigns of the Hundred Years War.59 Simon had close connections with the anglophile party in Ghent, led after 1338 by Jacob van Artevelde. When the cities rebelled and Louis of Nevers f led to Paris (1339), Van Artevelde and the Ghent anglophile leaders appointed Simon regent of Flanders. Abandoning his comital connections, Simon joined the rebel government and helped craft a military and economic alliance between England and Flanders. In 1346, the count’s supporters murdered Simon, and shortly after the rebel regime fell.60 During their marriage, Simon and Lijsbette’s property was divided into community property and each spouse’s personal property. Simon owned the rural land, the city lots, and the hereditary annuities (all immovable property), which he had possessed before the marriage as his personal property. Lijsbette held an estate at Zomergem (given to her by her half-brother Louis of Nevers for her wedding portion) as her personal property. The houses, furnishings, valuables, clothing, cash, and debts of each became community property, owned by both, but under Simon’s exclusive control. Any property, movable or immovable, that Simon or Lijsbette purchased or acquired after they married became community property unless it was inherited. When Simon’s father Jean de Mirabello died in 1333, Simon’s portion of his father’s immovable property became

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 71

2/9/2011 12:37:12 PM

72

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

his personal property, while movable property went into the couple’s community property.61 As one of the wealthiest men in Flanders, Simon left behind a large and complicated estate. He was part owner of the family business, a conglomeration of banking houses that handled loans, currency exchange, and deposits in numerous Flemish and Brabantine cities, including Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, and Mechelen. Edward III, his largest debtor; Count Louis of Nevers; the dukes of Brabant and Clèves, and many less prominent people owed him money. He had extended several large loans to the city of Ghent during the Van Artevelde regime.62 He owned extensive rural property, including manors at Perwez, Heusden, and Melsele. He owned houses and plots of land in numerous cities. In Ghent alone he owned four houses made from stone, which was still rather unusual in the medieval city and a sign of great wealth. In addition, he had purchased numerous annuities from cities, religious institutions, and individuals. By the time that Simon’s estate was divided in January 1350, Lijsbette had already remarried, to a Brabantine nobleman, Arnold van Horne, Lord of Rummen.63 Simon and she had no children, but he had two daughters, Lijsbette and Kateline, from a previous marriage (see Figure 3.6). This Lijsbette had married a knight from a prominent Ghent noble-patrician family, Ywein van Vaernewijc, by whom she had several children.64 She was deceased by 1350. Kateline had married twice by 1350, first to a Ghent patrician, Gherem Uten Swane, and then to the noble Philip van Massemine, Lord of St. Joris, and had children by both fathers. As surviving spouse, Lijsbette inherited half of the community property.65 She had the right to do whatever she wished with it, including selling it or carrying it into a second marriage. All of Simon’s personal First Wife (dec.)

Lijsbette (dec.)

Simon de Mirabello (dec.)

Ywein van Varnewijc

Van Varnewijc Children

Lijsbette van Lierde

Gherem Uten Swane (dec.)

Kateline

Uten Swane Children

Arnold van Horne

Philip van Massemine

Van Massemine Children

Figure 3.6 Simon de Mirabello van Halen and Family

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 72

2/9/2011 12:37:12 PM

73

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

property and the other half of the community property went to Simon’s heirs: his daughter Kateline, with her husband Philip van Massemine, and the deceased Lijsbette’s widower, Ywein van Vaernewijc, and her children (who would split the daughter Lijsbette’s portion in half ). Simon’s widow Lijsbette was entitled to a lifetime usufruct, called a bijleving, of one-half of the heir’s half of the community property and one-half of the income from Simon’s personal property and fiefs.66 Thus, Lijsbette would own and control three-quarters of Simon’s estate for her lifetime even if she remarried. All the debts Simon owed had to be paid before the estate was divided. The heirs had to pay the bequests, the widow had to pay compensation for services already rendered, and they all had to split the costs of the funeral.67 Simon’s extensive business interests made his estate particularly thorny to divide equitably. The widow and heirs had to assess just what was movable and immovable property and when each piece of immovable property had been acquired in order to place it in either community or personal property. Assessments and decisions about each piece of the extensive holdings of Simon de Mirabello filled multiple folios of parchment in a series of agreements reached through arbitration and judgments by the aldermen in 1350 and 1351. For example, just one item from one act reads: Item, on the point about the property that was purchased during the marriage, at Eeklo, Kaprijk, Lembeke and surrounding areas, the arbiters decided with the consent of the parties, that if it was land held in fief, that my lady [would] receive her usufruct; and if it was hereditary land [erf ], my lady [would receive] one half as her personal property and for the other half, her usufruct; and their chattels are divisible. . . .68

And there were at least twenty pieces of property in the De Mirabello portfolio.69 Lijsbette plunged into this messy litigation showing she knew exactly what she was doing and holding tenaciously to her rights. In nine of the eleven documents concerning this case, she appeared herself to transact business. Her new husband, Arnold van Horne, does not seem to have accompanied her, because he is only mentioned in the initial identifiers and never in the body of the documents. For example, in one debt acknowledgement, the clerk identified Lijsbette as a noble woman [ene edele vrouwe ende werde vrouwe Lijsbette], Simon’s widow [mijne her Symoens wijf was van Halen], and Arnold’s wife [nu wettelike wijf mijn her Arnoude van Huerle her van Rommene], but in the remainder of the document, the clerk used the term “my lady” [mier vrouw] to designate the legal actor Lijsbette.70

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 73

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

74

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

In 1350, four years after her husband’s assassination, Lijsbette claimed that she had paid out 127 pounds groot to satisfy debts and pay for Simon’s funeral, and 81 pounds for bequests.71 She charged that the heirs, represented by her stepsons-in-law, Ywein van Vaernewijc and Philip van Massemine, had not yet repaid her and were withholding some of her usufruct. Because the widow and the heirs could not agree on the settlement of the estate, by custom, each appointed two arbiters to represent their interests.72 These four men met to negotiate a compromise agreement and were able to resolve a number of issues. They also made a list of those issues that were still unresolved.73 The heirs wanted to know where two silver dishes were that had not been included in the division. Where were the 160 sheep that witnesses testified should be on the land at Erembodegem? They demanded that Lijsbette bring in all the charters and documents she possessed so that the arbiters could examine them. Lijsbette countered with claims of her own. Where was her half of the fifty pounds groot that Jan Sconejans had paid to the heirs? Where were the profits from her usufruct on the fees from the mills and the canal paths that had not been paid to her since Simon’s death? She argued that some of the land at Wicheline and Herdersem was community property, for this, she wanted her half; and some was held in fief, and for this she wanted her usufruct. Furthermore, she had already turned in all of the charters.74 These demands and others like them were now laid before the aldermen for their decision. In the meantime, a priest named Pieter Masengarbe had sued Lijsbette for half of a damage claim on her late husband for forty-five pounds groot.75 The heirs had already paid their half, and Pieter wanted payment from Lijsbette as well. She, however, chose to fight the claim; she denied legitimacy of the debt, and after Pieter challenged her, she swore an oath denying the debt. By the custom of Ghent, this procedure, a “costbodinghe van eede,” absolved her of the debt, and so the aldermen declared her free and quit and ordered Pieter to surrender all the documents to her.76 Lijsbette’s actions f latly contradict the limitations placed upon married women in the prescriptive sources redacted in the sixteenth century. Under that written custom, a married woman was subject to the authority of her new husband.77 Arnold should have been in complete control of community property (that is, the movable property from Simon’s estate). The sixteenth-century custom dictated that Lijsbette owned the immovables as her personal property and had to consent to their sale, but Arnold was supposed to control that property for her, negotiate with heirs, act publicly, and take oaths.78 But this is not what happened in fourteenth-century reality. Arnold may not even have been present and certainly took no active role. Even if he had written out a formal grant of permission and empowerment for her, it could not account for the scope

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 74

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

75

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

of economic activity extended to Lijsbette. The aldermen and their clerks treated her as a fully capable legal person. Furthermore, they consistently named Lijsbette alone as the active party for all debts, obligations, and actions, as in the following act: Be it known to all that the noble and worthy Lady Lijsbette, who was the wife of my Lord Simoen van Halen, now legal wife of my Lord Arnold van Horne, Lord of Rummen, came before the aldermen of the Kuere in Ghent . . . and made known that . . . she owed Wouter van der Hasselt eight pounds groot for the arrears of a liferent annuity that Wouter had from my lady. My lady promised to pay this sum of money . . . and if my lady fails to do this, Symoen SerThomaes as surety . . . [will pay what] my lady has promised . . . .79

Under the burgher construction dominant in the fourteenth century, a married woman could publicly perform the management of her own personal property (and apparently, community property that had originated from her side) before the aldermen without her husband, as long as he did not object. The aldermen granted her legal capability in a casual and uncontentious manner, indicating that this was not outside of the customary practice. Even though Lijsbette appeared in court as a fully capable legal person without her husband, she was not acting entirely alone. Acting entirely alone was something no medieval Ghentenar would have valued, as connections and social networks were indispensable to survival. She undoubtedly employed numerous clerks, receivers, and legal advisors, some of whom had probably worked for Simon as well. Since Simon’s rebellion had likely severed her ties to her own family, which were already tenuous at best, Lijsbette used a network of Ghent patricians and local gentry, all male, to act as sureties, receivers, and arbiters for her. One was the Ghent patrician, Simon SerThomaes, a wine merchant, tax farmer, and alderman of the Keure in 1352–53.80 In March 1350, Lijsbette acknowledged that she owed him forty-nine pounds groot, which she guaranteed by pawning land and a hereditary annuity.81 As there was no provision for repayment, it appears that Lijsbette was giving that property to him to satisfy the debt.82 In 1354, she made a bequest of forty pounds groot to Simon’s children, maybe related to money he had loaned her or services he had rendered.83 A local noble, Jan van Gavere, and prominent Ghentenars Jan van den Wallekine, Pauwels de Blonde, and Bertram van Lovendeghem also served as sureties for Lijsbette, either in debt contracts or as pledges for her compliance with the arbitral settlements.84 Lijsbette operated within a network of men who held power in the city and its hinterland, a network

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 75

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

76

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

which she had inherited from her husband. These men had inf luence over her actions, because she needed their support. However, this dependency was not gender-specific. Lijsbette acted just as any man would have acted. She accessed her networks for sureties, representatives, receivers, and arbiters to support her in financial transactions and legal disputes. A widower settling his wife’s complex estate would have appealed to his network of kin, friends, and associates to fulfill these vital functions for him in the same way. Nevertheless, Lijsbette did choose men rather than women, as more useful to her for public support. The aldermen made the final disposition of the inheritance dispute between Lijsbette and the heirs in April 1352. Lijsbette received certain properties over the protest of Philip van Massemine and other heirs, but the aldermen ordered her to pay the heirs 300 pounds groot and gave them all her houses and city lots in Bruges and Damme as partial payment.85 In 1352–53, she partnered with Hanse merchant Thideman Blomenrod of Bruges to loan 245 pounds groot to the city of Ghent, a move that strongly suggests she continued to manage and invest her fortune, both by herself and with the aid of urban merchants, perhaps until her death in 1365.86 Lijsbette van Lierde represented herself on at least nine occasions before the aldermen, negotiated agreements, and sold both movable and immovable property, accessing a network of Ghent patricians and local gentry for support rather than her new husband or her own family. Her choice stands at one end of the continuum of women’s options for economic activity. The choice of her stepdaughter, Kateline de Mirabello or van Halen, wife of the local noble Philip van Massemine, stands at the opposite. Although Kateline inherited one-fourth of her late father’s estate, only one of these documents lists her name, following the name of her husband in the extensive list of the heirs of Simon de Mirabello who were selling property in Bruges.87 Otherwise, she did not appear to represent herself or the interests of her children by a previous marriage, as many other remarried widows did, but instead she let their male guardians assume this role.88 Kateline’s property, both movable and immovable, was clearly under the control of her husband, and the acts involving this property were written using the patrimonial construction. In 1354, he sold a piece of peat moor, immovable property that technically was Kateline’s personal property, without any mention of Kateline’s consent.89 This act shows that the aldermen were prepared to extend the same casual acceptance to husbands acting for their wives as they extended to wives managing their own property. In reality, the aldermen’s acceptance may not have been so casual; the aldermen may have questioned Philip van Massemine on this point, or perhaps they relied upon what was common

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 76

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

77

knowledge.90 But once the aldermen had verified Kateline’s compliance for one act, her public role was done, and there was no need for the clerks to include even her name in any other acts. One possibility is that Philip van Massemine did not allow his wife Kateline any access to financial matters and intimidated her so thoroughly that she was afraid to go to the aldermen to claim her right. Even though the aldermen upheld the right of a woman to manage her personal property, there is no question that a husband’s objections would complicate any action his wife took. As a noble, Philip van Massemine may have preferred the patrimonial system of feudal tenure, rather than the burgher construction of urban landowning.91 When Philip married Kateline, he probably looked forward with anticipation to the day that she would inherit one-fourth of her father’s property. He might have been willing to discuss matters with Kateline in private, but the very thought that his wife might appear in public arguing about rents, land, and sheep like a common burgher’s wife may have mortified him. He might have strongly preferred the patrimonial construction and ordered or convinced his wife to stay home. It is also possible that Kateline de Mirabello chose to let Philip manage her property. She did not have to take charge, since Philip had the training and local connections to look after her interests.92 She was not forced, as some women were, to compensate for an absent or incompetent husband. Perhaps she did not want to play an active role. She may have shown a disinterest in learning about business, or a lack of talent. Growing up in a wealthy, noble, urban household with connections to the comital court in a period when burgher and patrimonial ideas were contested, she might have heard conf licting opinions about the public economic activity of women. While we cannot know her mind, dreams of marrying a wealthy and handsome young noble and enjoying the social whirl of noble pastimes probably sounded more attractive than selecting the most profitable annuity to purchase. Systematically eschewing the public performance of her right to manage her own property lent a kind of continuity to Kateline’s economic life. Although her experience as the manager of a noble household would certainly acquaint her with some business techniques, Kateline would find it challenging to manage her estate by herself as a widow because she had no practice at public performance. Lijsbette and her stepdaughter Kateline represent the opposite extremes of the spectrum of choices women had in the management of property in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. Lijsbette was a married woman managing and controlling both her personal property and community property without any apparent input from her new husband. She was not unique; there were eight married women who appeared alone before the

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 77

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

78

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

aldermen in lawsuits over property, and thirteen married women who bought and sold property without their husbands.93 Kateline was a married woman whose husband managed and entirely controlled her property (at least publicly). She was not unique either; there were twelve wives whose husbands represented them in lawsuits, and sixteen wives whose husbands sold their property.94 These two women respectively embody the burgher and patrimonial constructions of women’s role in economic activities, views that both contradicted each other and coexisted. The aldermen also interacted with women’s choices, husbands and family members, and cultural attitudes in a negotiated process. By the mid-fourteenth century, the estates of members of the urban elites usually contained mixtures of urban property, rural property, and annuities held both inside and outside the city of Ghent. In the unsettled political climate of the mid-fourteenth century, the aldermen made decisions on a case-bycase basis to interpret the multitude of customs that applied in these mixed estates. When a noblewoman like Lijsbette van Lierde chose to perform the management role for the property she had inherited from her first husband, the aldermen let her do so, perhaps after quietly ascertaining that her new husband had no objection. They then let her manage not only her personal property but also the community property. They interpreted the oral custom in a “burgher” way to accommodate what Lijsbette wanted to do and what her husband was willing to let her do. At the same time, when Philip van Massemine appeared before the aldermen acting for his wife in the management of her personal property, the aldermen let him do so as well. Once they had ascertained that Kateline did not object, they allowed Philip to handle not only the settlement of Kateline’s inheritance from her father’s estate, but also the sale of Kateline’s personal property without her express consent. The aldermen interpreted the oral custom in a patrimonial way to accommodate what Philip wanted to do and what his wife was willing to let him do. The f lexibility of the aldermen, juggling two different systems and numerous individual choices, gave them a leading role in the negotiation of women’s economic activity. Conclusion Women’s choices were spread along such a broad continuum because of the combination of these factors: external exigencies; negotiation undertaken with husband, family and the aldermen; and women’s own talents and desires. External forces kept women from participating often in the rural real estate market, as the exclusionary tactics of elite men were beyond their control. Death, exile, and political turmoil forced some women to take charge of their households because their husbands

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 78

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

“ H E R A N D A L L H E R P ROP E RT Y ”

79

could not. Many acts show the results of negotiation: husband-and-wife economic partnerships buying urban real estate and annuities, and married women defending themselves in lawsuits about property they had inherited. The most common choice a woman made was to involve herself in some economic activities for the profit of her household and her immediate family, as Clementie Tsuul did. This choice of involvement, rather than independence or total dependence, rather than outright control or total abnegation of responsibility, was the most f lexible choice, as it was adaptable to changing necessities and to the negotiation process. Husbands and wives could operate as economic partners, often appearing together to manage family business, and both contributing to the prosperity of the household. Women had a certain stature as partners, and also gained experience in business, which enabled them to be more effective property managers as widows. The involvement of women for the benefit of the family made their economic lives continuous and reinforced the burgher construction. Ownership of property and public performance were the cornerstones of the women’s economic activity in late medieval Ghent. Although a married woman’s ownership of personal property gave her the right to manage that property, or at least to participate in the management of that property, she had to claim that right by public performance before the aldermen. In addition, women’s property ownership and performance of management gave them entrance into profitable economic opportunities, not on the top rung of the economy, but solidly on the middle and moderately prosperous rungs. Women could maintain themselves by investments or by a combination of investments and work in order to live within family households or outside them, without necessarily suffering poverty. Their investments in annuities and in the credit markets that are the subject of the next chapter gave them an important role in fostering commercial activity and economic growth in Ghent.

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 79

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

9780230104952_05_ch03.indd 80

2/9/2011 12:37:13 PM

CHAPTER 4 WEBS OF CREDIT AND CIRCULATION OF WEALTH

I

n 1358, a clerk wrote an inventory of the property of Joncvrouw Lisbette Langheroc, who was being placed under guardianship because she could no longer take care of herself. Lisbette owned a house, a bed and other furniture, textiles and dishes, silver plate, and liferent annuities. In exchange for receiving this when she died, Jan van Curtrike swore to support Lisbette, “to give her food, drink, clothing, stockings, shoes and all that she needs according to her status as long as she lives.”1 The inventory also records that she owed small debts to three persons, and five persons owed debts to her. Her creditors were three women identified as Joncvrouwen; her biggest debtor owed fourteen shillings groot, and the smallest, “a woman in the Papen Street,” owed her six pence.2 Lisbette may have made small loans in order to supplement her income, or sold goods or services on credit. The inventory, a snapshot of her economic life, shows that she did not keep her wealth in ready money, but in possessions and in credit relationships that enabled her to secure what she needed. William Jordan’s study, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies, demonstrated that female moneylenders were common in medieval Europe.3 Jordan concluded that women’s loans were between one-third and one-half of the value of men’s loans, and women comprised between 11 and 16 percent of total moneylenders.4 Christian women moneylenders were generally widows, but Jewish moneylenders were often married women. Not usually professionals, women lent small amounts for short terms, especially to other women, in what Jordan called “networks of female sociability.”5 He concluded that women specialized in the “domestic part of the market,” while men’s loans tended to be more for business needs, but that wealthy women, largely widows, made

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 81

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

82

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

sizeable loans to men and institutions, particularly in low-risk municipal annuities.6 While the Ghent evidence supports some of Jordan’s conclusions, the 741 credit acts in the aldermen’s registers from 1339–61 reveal far more women loaning larger amounts of money in more far-ranging credit relationships. Twenty-four percent of the credit acts included at least one woman loaning or borrowing in her own name, and most of them were not widows. Women were more often creditors than debtors, and the average amount of their loans exceeded Jordan’s estimates.7 Women were not more inclined to loan to other women; the majority of their loans were to men. What truly distinguishes Ghent women in the credit market was how little they were different from the men with whom they transacted business. Moreover, while men used dowries to circulate women’s wealth in the Italian cities, in Ghent, women often circulated their wealth themselves.8 Women used small-scale credit for common expenses, but they also used the credit market for investment. Their investments provided capital for business ventures and economic expansion. Although few of them penetrated into the highest levels of city finance or into the sector of long-distance trade, women were fully functional participants in the Ghent credit market at all other levels. Ghent and other Flemish cities ran on credit because of the serious shortage of ready money.9 A lack of smaller coins meant that tradespeople routinely allowed customers to run up a tab. Due to inf lation and frequent debasements of coinage, merchants swiftly reinvested their assets in goods or land rather than holding specie. Most people would turn around any cash they received almost immediately to pay off their debts or to loan out to someone else. Most evidence of this activity has vanished. The city accounts list loans from wealthy citizens to the city and those registered as moneylender-pawnbrokers, literally “usurers” [persemiers], who paid a tax to the city more as a license to operate than as a penalty for usury.10 However, only a few records, like Lijsbette Langheroc’s inventory, give evidence of small, ordinary transactions, which must have comprised the majority of women’s and men’s credit relationships. The debt transactions (debt contracts between individuals, judgments of debt disputes, and quit declarations) recorded in the aldermen’s registers were for major purchases or investments of capital rather than for daily consumption. Most concern debts larger than one pound groot, the price of a horse or a mailshirt.11 The common form for these large credit obligations was the debt contract or acknowledgement [schuldbekentenis],

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 82

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

83

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

which included the names of the creditor(s) and debtor(s), the amount, and how the debt would be repaid. A typical debt contract reads: Be it known that Willem van Artevelde, ser Jan’s son, came before the aldermen of the Keure . . . [and] declared that he owes a worthy debt to Lijsbette de Bruwere of forty-eight shillings groot . . . . which he promised to pay in three payments, that is: sixteen shillings groot at the next Pentecost, and sixteen shillings groot in the middle of August and then sixteen shillings groot at the following Feast of St. Baaf [1 October] without any fraud or dishonesty.12

The acts typically only list the amount due rather than the amount loaned, a device to conceal interest. The aldermen’s clerks used the same legal formulas—acknowledging and quitting debts—for loans, sales on credit, default on annuities, inheritance settlements, and damages awarded to litigants.13 They rarely recorded either the occupations of the participants or the reason for the debt, tragic omissions from the point of view of the modern researcher. Some debtors guaranteed the creditor security by pledging property as collateral, as in this short contract from 1358: Eyzoete, the wife of Jan Louchys, declared that she owes Jan Haghelsteene thirteen gulden and six pennies groot. Item, [she owes to] Kateline Haghelsteene one pound groot. Done on the 9th day of April, on her and all her property.14

Eyzoete was pledging her own personal property, from which the creditors could confiscate the amount due if she failed to repay the loan. Another method of securing the debt was naming a surety, roughly equivalent to a co-signer, for the loan. If the borrower could not pay, the surety was fully liable for the debt. Often, sureties were family members, or already owed money to the debtor, in which case the suretyship was a form of repayment.15 If a debtor did not repay the loan, the creditor could bring him before the aldermen and submit proof of the debt, either by a chirograph, witnesses, or both. The aldermen employed progressive pressure on the debtor or surety to pay, including confiscation of collateral and imprisonment for refusing to pay.16 Social position, gender, or marital status did not outweigh the terms of the debt contract in the aldermen’s eyes. In 1339, they threatened to imprison Aechte, wife of Everdey de Gruter, a prominent patrician, if she did not pay two pounds groot to Rueben den Blauwere within ten days.17 By systematically enforcing debt contracts, the aldermen ensured the security of creditors.

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 83

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

84

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Another security for creditors was that husbands and wives were responsible for each other’s debts. Although the written custom redacted in the sixteenth century allowed husbands to repudiate debts contracted by their wives without their consent, the aldermen did not allow repudiation in mid-fourteenth-century actual practice.18 In 1361, a mercer named Lisbette van den Conkele sued Jan Bollaerd for twenty-six shillings groot, a debt his late wife had contracted.19 Bollaerd defended himself by saying that he had no knowledge of that debt, but to no avail. The aldermen ordered him to pay her the entire amount within two months. Neither his claim that he had no knowledge of the debt (and therefore could not have approved of it) nor the insolvency of his and his wife’s finances were convincing defenses. Widows fared no better. Two days before Christmas in 1360, the aldermen adjudicated a dispute between Brother Jan Inghele and Kateline, the widow of Jacob van Smettelede. Brother Jan claimed twenty pounds groot that “he said that he had loaned Jacob her husband.” Kateline defended herself by saying that “she did not know about this debt, nor had she heard about it during the lifetime of Jacob her husband.”20 The aldermen ordered her to pay up. In actual practice, the aldermen treated male and female widowed debtors equally. The aldermen enforced debt contracts without either restricting married women or protecting them, which gave women an extra measure of creditworthiness. A creditor could make a loan to a married woman and know that if she died, the aldermen would hold her husband responsible for paying the debt. Fifteen percent of the professional moneylender-pawnbrokers registered in the city accounts were women.21 None of the women paid the highest fees (a measure of the size of their businesses), but several paid middling amounts. Only one of the women registered as a moneylenderpawnbroker in this period appears as the principal in a credit act in the aldermen’s registers. But in this 1350 act, Jacob van der Maerct promised to pay ten pounds groot to Kateline Toets, for a “sum of money Kateline loaned to him in the past for his great need [and] in good ready money.” 22 If this Jacob van der Maerct was a member of the De Mercato family of Piedmontese bankers who operated in Ghent, Kateline transacted business in banking and commercial circles that operated internationally. 23 However, this is the only loan she made for which evidence survives. Either as deputies of their husbands or as owners of personal property, wealthy women made significant contributions to city finance through voluntary or forced loans. Although some loan records had fewer women participants, women comprised almost half of the total creditors who loaned money to the city for a military expedition to Courtrai in 1339. Of these thirteen women, six were widows and three were wives of

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 84

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

85

prominent men.24 These wives and widows were clearly making loans from community property derived from their husbands, who were absent or deceased. The clerks acknowledged this relationship by identifying these women as “the wife of Lievin van der Caerden” [Lieviins wijf van der Caerden] or “Sir Ghelnoet Amman’s widow” [ser Ghelnoets Ammans weduwe], without giving the woman’s first name.25 However, in the same record are five women creditors who are identified only by their own name or title, such as “Ver Marie Temmermans” and “Joncvrouw Yden van Eerzele.”26 The money they were loaning to the city probably came from their own property, which made their own names crucial and their marital status irrelevant. A total of sixty-one women loaned money to the city in the period between 1339 and 1361. Eleven were noblewomen, and most of the remainder had patrician or elite surnames.27 The clerks identified eighteen as wives or widows with their husbands’ names, but more than half of the women appeared with no marital status or male identifier. Widows and a few noblewomen (who were usually not identified by marital status or male relative) paid the highest amounts (between 150 and 320 pounds). However, the average amount paid by non-noble women who were not identified by a male relative was 100 pounds. Although significantly outnumbered by wealthy men, women who were wealthy in their own names were important feeders of the city’s voracious appetite for credit. Although one-quarter of the hundreds of credit transactions in the aldermen’s registers contain a woman principal, only a few acts explain the purpose for the debt or offer evidence of the economic sector they served. Some of those documents mention debts for raw materials and services that can be tied to certain crafts, particularly dyeing, draping, and other aspects of wool cloth production.28 Annuities sold by women may also have financed craft production. In 1350, Soy van der Joden pawned all his chattels and furniture “except the dyeing equipment and brewing equipment” to Ver Lisbette de Proesst because he owed her arrears on an annuity.29 When she sold him this annuity, she might have been advancing him the money that established him in the dyeing and brewing trades. Many of the credit acts with no explanations probably concerned craftspeople who owed their suppliers, or customers who owed for finished products.30 Women were also heavily involved in credit relationships in the real estate sector, as many sales contracts for land and other property outlined arrangements for the buyer to pay the seller over time.31 By contrast, few women acting in their own names were involved in credit transactions involving international commerce. The only direct evidence of international trade in the annual registers is a series of debt

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 85

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

86

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

contracts between Ghent wine merchants and various German suppliers for large shipments of wine.32 These merchants were virtually all (elite) men. More indirect evidence can be gathered from the contracts and lawsuit adjudications of hostelers, moneychangers, brokers, and guild elites, because local merchants involved in international trade in wool, cloth, and grain often registered for these occupations. 33 The small group of elite men who dominated international trade appeared repeatedly as aldermen, city officials, tax farmers, and suppliers of wine and cloth to the city.34 The only woman to approach the economic level of this group was Celie Amelakens, an independent businesswoman who operated a money exchange for decades.35 However, wives sometimes acted in international trade as deputies of their husbands. In 1350, Gillis van der Pale, a former alderman, traveled to Rome on a diplomatic mission. While he was there, he borrowed 400 f lorins from Giovanni Bardi of Florence “for the business and profit of the city of Ghent.”36 Back in Ghent, Gillis’s wife Alise paid 470 f lorins to the hosteler Jan Scinkel to be given to the Bardis. Showing the legal documents that legitimized the transaction, Jan requested that the city reimburse Alise. Her role in this interesting transaction was critical. In Gillis’s absence, she was able to come up with a huge amount of money, the equivalent of thirty-three pounds groot. She paid off the Ghent hosteler who collected for the Florentine moneylender and was prepared to wait for repayment from the city. She handled the public performance of the entire transaction alone, even if directed from afar by her husband. Women clearly assisted the elite group of men who controlled international commerce, although women were seldom involved in this top echelon of profitable trade in their own names. However, the vast majority of the acts in the aldermen’s registers give no reason for the debt, which makes analysis of these economic sectors extremely tentative. Nevertheless, the acts do contain a wealth of information about gender and credit in Ghent. The number of acts involving women in their own names, the size of women’s loans, and their involvement at all stages of their lives make clear that women were fully functional participants in the Ghent credit market as a whole. “Fully functional” does not, however, mean “equal.” Men outnumbered women as participants. Women loaned and borrowed small and medium-sized sums in equal proportions to men, but far fewer women than men loaned and borrowed the largest sums. Nevertheless, below the top echelon, women moneylenders and borrowers operated in the center of credit market, not on the margins. The sheer number of women who loaned and borrowed money is a powerful indication that women were fully functional participants in the Ghent credit market (see Figure 4.1).37 One out of every four credit acts

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 86

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

87

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial) 20 3% Represented Women 12 2%

Women in More Than One Category 18 2%

Women in Their Own Names 176 24%

Wives with Husbands 47 6%

Men Only 468 63%

Figure 4.1 Credit Acts by Gender and Activity Status (Total = 741)

includes a woman as creditor, debtor, or surety in her own name, a considerably higher rate than Jordan’s average of 11 to 16 percent.38 In addition, women were more often creditors than debtors, by a wide margin (see Figure 4.2). Because more than one active woman appears in many of these acts, there are, in total, 250 active women from the credit acts in the registers from 1339 to 1361. The “Other” category includes sureties, witnesses, representatives, and principals in lawsuits in which the creditor-debtor relationship is not clear. There were 133 women who made one or more substantial loans as an investment of their available capital and considered that loan important enough to warrant the extra expense of having a clerk record the act in the aldermen’s register. The debts recorded in the aldermen’s registers were not small-scale loans. Even the lowest category represents a significant investment. One pound groot was the average price for a horse in the 1420s, and one penny groot (1/240 of a pound) could purchase five pounds of cheese in the 1350s. 39 While women rarely borrowed or loaned at the two highest levels, they often borrowed and loaned at the low and middle levels (see Table 4.1).40 A larger percentage of women’s loans than men’s loans were in the smallest category, loans of less than 1 pound groot. The distribution of women’s loans was slightly less than men’s in the 1 to 5 pounds category,

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 87

2/9/2011 12:36:33 PM

88

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Other 23 9%

Debtors 94 38%

Creditors 133 53%

Figure 4.2 Roles of Women in Their Own Names in Credit Acts (Total = 250)

Table 4.1

Comparative Sizes of Men’s and Women’s Loans

Amount of Loan Less than 1 lb. groot 1–5 lb. groot 5–20 lb. groot 20–100 lb. groot More than 100 lb. groot Total

Number of Acts with Men Only 67 153 102 72 17 411

Percent of All Acts with Men Only

Number of Acts with Women in Their Own Names

Percent of All Acts with Women in Their Own Names

16% 37% 25% 18% 4% 100%

42 59 54 15 2 172

24% 35% 31% 9% 1% 100%

but was greater than men’s in the 5 to 20 pounds category (31 percent of women’s loans compared to 25 percent of men’s). There is a sharp decline in women’s loans at the highest levels. The pattern shows that women were quite active on the middle levels, which featured sums many times greater than the yearly income of average burghers.

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 88

2/9/2011 12:36:34 PM

89

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

Ghent women were also active in the credit market at all stages of their lives (see Figure 4.3). Most of the single women (identified by their father’s and brother’s names) were creditors, while married women who acted in their own name were slightly more likely to be debtors than creditors. A few female creditors were nuns, whose religious status had no effect on the way the clerks described their legal economic acts. These acts do not employ any of the charitable language or the eschewing of interest that characterizes the acts of nuns elsewhere.41 In 1350, for example, the aldermen ordered Jan Pepercoren to pay two sisters, Lijsbette and Mergriete van Lemberghem, nuns at two different convents, nine pounds parisis within a month or suffer imprisonment.42 Only one-quarter of the women who performed credit acts before the aldermen were widows. Widows were the only group of women that contained many more debtors (thirty-four) than creditors (nineteen), likely because widows often had to settle their late husbands’ estates in a difficult economic climate. Many of these widows were identified only by their marital status and their late husband’s names. For example, the aldermen ordered “the widow of Jan Baerds” to pay twenty-two golden shillings to the hallmasters within two months or be imprisoned.43 When the clerks identified a widow in this way, she was almost certainly seen as the continuer of her husband’s business affairs, so much so that her own name was insignificant. Widows continuing their husband’s businesses, either for a short period merely to wind up his affairs or for a longer period, clearly were important to their families and to the economy, but they did not comprise the majority of women in credit acts.

90

Unknown Married Widowed Single Religious

82

80 70 60 50 37

40

34

30 20

16

19

18 10

10

12 6

7

5 0

0 Creditors

Debtors

2

1

1

Other

Figure 4.3 Creditors and Debtors by Marital Status (Total = 250)

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 89

2/9/2011 12:36:34 PM

90

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

The largest percentage of women who acted in their own names were those with no given marital status. Two-thirds of them were creditors. The aldermen designated these women only by their given names and surnames, just as they identified most men. These women’s credit relationships were not dependent on their male relatives, so those relatives were not named. The marital status of these women was irrelevant because they were risking their own property and performing the acts on their own. The marital status distribution of women who borrowed and loaned money in their own names presents a decided contrast to many studies of pre-modern moneylending, in which the majority of women moneylenders were widows.44 Although recent research into the economic activities of single women in England and elsewhere is calling the emphasis on widows into question, the association of widows with their husbands’ wealth remains ingrained.45 In studies of England, early modern France, and even fifteenth-century Ghent, widows were key investors in moneylending, municipal and crown debts, and annuities.46 The predominance of widows in these studies implies that these women’s activities began with their widowhood and that the property they were investing originated from their late husbands’ estates. The fourteenth-century Ghent evidence not only shows the continuity of a woman’s economic life through changes in her marital status, but also indicates that these women were loaning money from their own property rather than their late husbands’ property. Women were not merely vehicles for management and transmission of property when men were not available, or placeholders bridging the gap between their husbands and their sons, but investors of their own property at all stages of their adult lives. Single women and women who were investing their own property not only made far more loans than widows did, but their loans were also just as large as those of widows (see Figure 4.4).47 Single/unknown women creditors (who made eighty-six loans) sharply outnumbered widow creditors (who made nineteen loans), and the amounts of the loans were commensurable. In the mid-fourteenth century, widows did not invest greater amounts of wealth in the credit market than single/unknown women did. Economic Biographies Although these women whose marital status is unknown were clearly important moneylenders, the absence of the names of male relatives makes them far more difficult to trace and connect from act to act.

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 90

2/9/2011 12:36:34 PM

91

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

Male Creditors

Widow Creditors

Single & Unknown Female Creditors

Widow Creditors

Male Creditors

Single & Unknown Female Creditors

Male Creditors

Widow Creditors

5%

Single & Unknown Female Creditors

10%

Male Creditors

15%

Widow Creditors

20%

Single & Unknown Female Creditors

25%

Male Creditors

30%

Widow Creditors

35% Single & Unknown Female Creditors

Percentage of Loans by Each Group

40%

0% Under 1 lb. groot

1–5 lbs. groot

5–20 lbs. groot

20–100 lbs. groot

Over 100 lbs. groot

Amounts of Loans

Figure 4.4 Comparison of Loans Amounts of Single and Unknown Female Creditors, Widow Creditors, and Male Creditors

The proliferation of popular saints’ names—Kateline, Lijsbette, and Mergriete—and the lack of additional identifiers prevent a reconstruction of their economic biographies. For example, consider the activities of a woman or women named Kateline van den Leene. She made two loans to the city of Ghent, one in 1352 and another in 1360, both for one and one-quarter pounds groot.48 In 1353, the city paid Kateline van den Leene four pounds on a hereditary annuity, and fifteen pounds on another in the following year.49 In 1352, Kateline van den Leene appeared before the aldermen of the Gedele swearing that she had seven pounds groot belonging to her children from their father’s estate. 50 In 1353, Kateline van den Leene transferred a chirograph (a debt acknowledgment to her from a nobleman) to Jan de Smet in exchange for his promise to pay her ten pounds and four shillings parisis.51 If these were all the acts of the same woman, she had a diverse portfolio of credit relationships with the city and private individuals, as well as hereditary annuities. However, without names of her relatives or identification of her real property, there is no way to be certain that these four acts belong to the same individual. It is impossible to reconstruct her economic life or to answer the many questions that these activities spark. Was she a widow, pursuing her own economic activities, and so identified by her own name alone? Was she perhaps a single mother, who supported herself and her children by moneylending and maybe a trade? Although

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 91

2/9/2011 12:36:34 PM

92

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

these women probably lived rich and varied economic lives within social networks of families, friends, and neighbors, their economic biographies cannot be reconstructed. The career of Mergriete Scettorf shows how much easier it is to reconstruct a woman’s economic biography if she is repeatedly identified by her male relatives. Mergriete was the daughter of Jan Scettorf, a prosperous Ghent burgher.52 When she first appeared in the surviving aldermen’s registers, she had already been married to a baker named Frank van den Hamme for some time, as they had a married daughter. Frank was not a patrician, nor among the highest elites, but Mergriete and he were certainly more prosperous than average artisans. They owned four houses in Ghent, the city lot on which their stall stood, and moor land, a great source of profit because peat was used for fuel.53 Frank and Mergriete were not professional moneylenders. The evidence of their financial dealings suggests that they did not specialize in any one type of investment, but instead spread out their capital in a number of ventures. Besides the bakery and moor, the couple probably rented out some of the space in the four houses they owned. Frank served as the guardian of several orphans, which gave him the use of their property and money during their minorities.54 In 1349–50, Frank and Mergriete made a huge loan to a noble family—the Van Oestendes—who were in serious financial difficulty. Over the course of a year, the couple progressed from acting as surety for Lady Isabelle van Oestende to extending a large short-term loan to Isabelle and her husband, Lord Gherard van Oestende. Analysis of the acts recording these transactions shows that the wives, Mergriete and Lady Isabelle, were heavily involved, and perhaps played leading roles in initiating and negotiating the deal. On August 15, 1349, Lady Isabelle, “wife of my lord Gherard van Oestende, the knight,” swore that she owed thirty pounds groot to the brothers Heinric and Clais de Jonghe.55 She named Frank van den Hamme as her surety. In return, Heinric and Clais agreed not to press further claims against “my lord Gherard and my lady.”56 Isabelle performed the debt acknowledgment alone before the aldermen and may have arranged for Frank van den Hamme’s services without her husband’s presence. Four months later, Lord Gherard appeared before the aldermen with his son, daughter, and other heirs, and they all pledged that they owed Frank van den Hamme and “Joncvrouw Mergriete his wife” fifty-one pounds groot.57 Promising to pay the sum over the next year, the debtors pledged all their property as collateral, giving Frank and Mergriete a lien on the entire family patrimony. The Van Oestende family was obviously in serious financial trouble, but they were able to repay Frank and Mergriete, who pocketed the concealed interest on the loan.58

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 92

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

93

Mergriete’s name, or the phrase “and his wife,” appears after Frank’s name each of the eight times his name is mentioned in the lengthy loan contract, even though there was no legal reason for her inclusion. Because they appeared together to perform the act, the clerk identified them as a husband-and-wife partnership using formulas from the burgher construction. Isabelle’s name does not appear at all in this act, even though she, rather than Gherard her husband, contracted the earlier loan from the De Jonghe brothers. Isabelle may not have been present when Gherard and his heirs promised to pay the Van den Hammes, or she may have been excluded for more strategic reasons. Not including Isabelle’s name excluded her personal property from the loan collateral. This would not work under Ghent custom, but their land may have been in the Franc of Bruges (where Oostende is located), whose custom allotted a portion of the community property to the widow before the creditors were paid.59 Isabelle and Gherard may have been economic partners who manipulated the status of property, liability, customs, and multiple courts and jurisdictions to survive financial crisis. Frank and Isabelle paid off the De Jonghe brothers, who gave them a quit declaration. The clerk once again named Mergriete along with Frank, except when he wrote that Frank had been the surety.60 When Frank and Mergriete paid the thirty pounds and secured the quit declaration from the De Jonghe brothers, they performed the act together, and the clerk recorded that joint performance in the written act. While usually we are left to imagine how the wife might have involved herself further behind the scenes, in this case, there is additional information about her participation. On 26 January, 1350, the day before Frank and Mergriete paid the creditors, Mergriete went alone before the aldermen of the Gedele to declare that she had borrowed fifteen pounds groot from the property of an orphan, Mergriete de Pape.61 To arrange this loan, Mergriete Scettorf would have negotiated with the girl’s guardian (voogd) and supervising guardian (toesienre), typically the surviving parent and someone from the deceased parent’s family. The act states that Mergriete Scettorf was acting “with the consent of Frank her husband.”62 She named four men as sureties, including Jan van der Wostinen, her sister’s husband, and put up her personal property as collateral: “and Mergriete has insured this money by herself and all her property.”63 Mergriete was thus offering double security for the loan, based on her property and at least partly on her own family connections. The likely scenario is that Frank and Mergriete needed ready money to complete the payment of thirty pounds that Lady Isabelle owed to the De Jonghe brothers. Mergriete borrowed the fifteen pounds on 26 January, and Frank and she paid the De Jonghe

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 93

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

94

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

brothers thirty pounds on 27 January. Mergriete repaid the debt to Mergriete de Pape’s guardian in January 1351, one year later and just after the Van Oestende party had to pay off the fifty-one pound debt, making the connection of the two debts clear. Mergriete was obviously fully enmeshed in the deal, and performed one of the legal acts alone before the aldermen of the Gedele. This series of four acts gives a much fuller picture of a large credit transaction than the single acts that are usually the only surviving record. The more complete transaction shows that some wives who were named alongside their husbands were not merely consenting to their husbands’ acts, but were actively involved in the public performance of the acts. Mergriete seems to have been the initiator and negotiator of the loan from Mergriete de Pape’s guardian. She may also have been the initiator of the deal with Isabelle van Oestende. Frank trusted Mergriete to fulfill public acts and enter into a debt for fifteen pounds groot, the equivalent of two years’ wages for a master mason. Frank regarded Mergriete as a capable partner whose actions he could trust, as she also performed another public act for him later.64 Mergriete, like Clementie Tsuul and the majority of women with husbands and children, used her property and her talents to advance a family strategy rather than to branch out on her own. As a widow, Mergriete was a sharp and able spokesperson, due to the experience she had gained during her marriage as Frank’s economic partner. After Frank’s death in 1352 or 1353, she appeared before the aldermen of the Keure along with Heinric Spikelboere, a priest, to defend her ownership of moor land claimed by a religious institution, the hospital of Assenede.65 The parcel in question was five and one-half bunders of land, which Mergriete’s father, Jan Scettorf, had purchased in 1339.66 She evidently had inherited most of this land from him, and held it as her personal property. She testified that half a bunder of that parcel belonged to the priest, perhaps as a result of a pious donation by her late father. Both Mergriete and Hughe Keeland, the representative of the Assenede hospital, had chirographs that apparently gave them ownership of the moor land. Mergriete and Heinric defended their ownership by “showing that he [Keeland] was not supposed to have it, because the piece of moor had been bought, received and lies in the place called Wulfsden, as their charter explains.”67 Apparently, Keeland’s chirograph did not specify Wulfsden, because the aldermen awarded the moor land to “the widow and sir Heinric, for the reason that their charter spoke about a specially named place called Wulfsden in which the moor lies.”68 Mergriete’s role in this canny bit of legalistic nitpicking shows her ability to negotiate difficult legal terrain to defend her property and interests.

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 94

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

95

Mergriete’s lifelong experience also shows in her relations with male relatives. She took her husband’s side against her brother and chose among her male relatives those she would include and those she would exclude.69 Mergriete had a brother named Jan Scettorf ( junior) and at least one other sibling, a sister whose name has not survived, married to Jan van der Wostinen. In 1350, the aldermen of Assenede-Ambacht ordered Frank and Mergriete to pay a fine of forty pounds parisis (three and one-third pounds groot).70 The couple sued her brother Jan Scettorf over this fine, and although the outcome is not recorded, it seems to have caused a permanent rupture between the siblings. In a second lawsuit, adjudicated in December 1350, the aldermen of the Gedele in Ghent handed down a series of decisions in a dispute between Jan van der Wostinen, “as legal guardian of his wife,” and Frank van den Hamme, “as legal guardian of his wife,” versus Jan Scettorf ( junior) over the division of the estate of the late Sir Jan Scettorf (senior).71 Jan Scettorf ( junior) had taken possession of certain property and claimed he had a special right to it. The aldermen rejected this claim, ordering that the property be divided equally. In addition, Jan Scettorf claimed a yearly payment from Jan van der Wostinen that had originally been intended to support the younger Scettorf as he studied for the priesthood. Since Jan Scettorf was not pursuing that vocation, the aldermen declared the chirograph outlining the agreement null and void. The fact that the aldermen of the Gedele themselves decided the issue means that the parties had failed to reach an amiable agreement, and arbitration and the intervention of family and friends [magen en vrienden] had also failed to end this dispute. Jan Scettorf may have been somewhat of a spendthrift, because he was also involved in another lawsuit over four pounds groot he owed to a Joncvrouw Mergriete Naes. In 1350, the aldermen of the Keure ordered him to pay her or be sent to prison.72 Mergriete Scettorf ’s role in this second lawsuit, as an adult woman under guardianship whose property was managed by “her husband and guardian,” was significantly different from the active role she played in other legal acts.73 While she was married, she was identified in legal acts in various ways: once as an adult woman under guardianship, three times as part of a husband-and-wife economic partnership, and three times as a woman in her own name.74 Her example shows the limitations of these categories to define the complex activities of a woman who appeared in many acts. It also suggests that urban elite men and women understood and manipulated the patrimonial and burgher constructions to suit their own needs. When Frank appeared alone to act for Mergriete in the second lawsuit against her brother, she may have wished to avoid an emotionally difficult confrontation with her brother, and so sent Frank alone to hear the judgment of the aldermen. Alternately, Frank may have

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 95

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

96

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

been following the lead of his brother-in-law, Jan van der Wostinen, who always appeared alone as the husband and guardian of his wife. While these possibilities are only conjectures, burgher couples may have moved in and out of the two constructions as one or the other suited their needs, just as they practiced many occupations and diversified investments. Mergriete had no further financial dealings with her brother Jan Scettorf, at least in the surviving record. But Jan van der Wostinen, her brother-in-law, supported her on several occasions. He acted as her surety for the loan from the property of Mergriete de Pape in 1350.75 After Frank’s death, Jan van der Wostinen served as Mergriete’s surety for the money that she held in trust for her minor son.76 Mergriete also relied on the support of Jan de Peyster, who was married to her daughter, also named Mergriete (naturally). Relations between mother-in-law and sonin-law were remarkably cordial. After Frank’s death, the aldermen of the Gedele named Mergriete (senior) as guardian for her minor son, Annekine ( Johnny), and Jan de Peyster as supervising guardian, as a representative of Frank’s side of the family. Jan de Peyster allowed Mergriete to invest six pounds groot belonging to Annekine without interference, and the two agreed to split the costs of raising the child.77 Jan de Peyster granted Mergriete a quit declaration for the child’s inheritance the same day she presented the inventory and for his wife’s inheritance just eleven days later, even though the fairly complex estate contained four houses, city lots, rural land, cash, and presumably debts and credits.78 Mergriete and her son-in-law were clearly on good terms. In 1360, Mergriete, now remarried to Heinric van Hoese, gave her new husband lifetime use of one of the houses that she and Frank had owned together.79 He reciprocated to her. Although it was technically illegal for husbands and wives to give each other gifts, such agreements were fairly common.80 The idea behind the gift was to allow the surviving spouse to remain in the house until his or her death, thus delaying division of the property until both spouses had died. Mergriete and Heinric secured the permission of all of their children, including, on Mergriete’s side, her son Jan van den Hamme, now an adult, her daughter Mergriete, and Jan de Peyster. These cooperative and compassionate agreements stand in sharp contrast to the lawsuits that separated Mergriete and her brother Jan Scettorf. Mergriete Scettorf ’s full documentary record shows a woman who was deeply involved with male family members and obviously constrained by their views and actions in some ways. However, she was not a pawn or tool of her male family members, but instead chose among her male relatives those who supported her efforts to advance family interests as she saw them. During her first marriage, Frank could have made economic

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 96

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

97

activity difficult for her if he wished. Instead, he supported her economic involvement and allowed (or perhaps encouraged?) her to be his business partner. Along with many other Ghent elite men, Frank viewed his wife’s economic activities with an approving eye, recognizing mutual advantages and common interests in the pursuit of a joint family strategy. With other male relatives and her second husband, Mergriete could exercise even more choice. Although marriage, widowhood, and remarriage caused significant changes in her personal life, her participation in the economy was changed more by economic variables and her growing experience than by changes in her marital status. Women’s Credit Relationships While it is rarely possible to reconstruct economic biographies for the women who loaned and borrowed money, there is sufficient evidence to identify patterns in women’s credit relationships in relation to gender, family connections, and status groups. Although the majority of their credit relationships were with nonrelated people, Ghent women sometimes borrowed from and loaned to other family members, often with care to secure written debt acknowledgements. Kateline Miere, for example, loaned twelve pounds groot to her son Pieter, which he promised to pay whenever she requested it “without any longer respite.”81 Inheritance divisions gave rise to debt obligations from one relative to another.82 There is even one debt contract between a husband and wife. In 1361, Jan Willaens “promised to satisfy and pay Lijsbette, his legal wife, one pound groot between now and the next St. Baaf ’s Mass (October 1),” leaving us to wonder what interesting story lay behind such lack of marital trust.83 Sometimes relatives were in business together, such as one mother who told her nephew (perhaps on her deathbed) that she owed her son three pounds groot “for all the business (coemanscepe) that she and Lambrecht her son had done together.”84 Women (and men) also guaranteed their relatives’ credit obligations.85 Parents, either together or alone, were often sureties for their children’s debts, perhaps acting somewhat like modern parents who co-sign a young adult’s first loan.86 Family members provided support in less material ways as well. When Mergriete van Ghend, a young patrician single woman, appeared before the aldermen to resolve a long-standing dispute with Gillis Rijnvisch, she brought along her aunt, Marie van den Kerchove, and “her relatives and friends.”87 Mergriete made serious concessions of property and money “to prevent more grief and damage” from a dispute between the prominent Rijnvisch family and her now-deceased grandfather and father.88 Marie van den Kerchove, as an older, more experienced

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 97

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

98

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

woman, may have given her niece advice about handling the lawsuit as well as emotional support. As in the case of Mergriete Scettorf, women relied upon certain family members in their credit relationships, while they distrusted others. Nevertheless, the majority of women’s credit relationships involved apparently unrelated persons, and most were with men rather than with other women. Figure 4.5 compares the percentages of loans made by men, women, and husband-and-wife partnerships to others within their own gendered category. Women’s loans to other women or to wives with husbands amounted to only 20 percent of their total loans, while men dealt with other men in 67 percent of their loans. In other words, men were much more likely to deal with other men than women were to deal with other women. This may be a result of the fact that there were more men than women involved in loaning and

100% 47

3

15

90% 24

15

152

80% 70% 60% 50% 40%

152 47

468 30% 20% 10% 0% Men (667 Acts)

Wives with Husbands

Women in Their Own Names (191 Acts)

Wives with Husbands (63 Acts)

Women in Their Own Names

Men

Figure 4.5 Comparison of Gender Relationships in Debt-Related Acts

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 98

2/9/2011 12:36:35 PM

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

99

borrowing money in these acts, and thus women would have to deal with them more often. However, the pattern does differ from Jordan’s conclusion that women’s credit relationships were most often with other women in “networks of female sociability.” 89 Perhaps womanto-woman exchanges were more common at the informal level, but at the middling and upper levels of the credit market represented in the aldermen’s acts, women loaned money to men rather than to other women. This does not mean that informal lending was less important than the middling and upper levels of the credit market. In reality, informal lending and small sales on credit were far more prevalent and significant to the lives of individual women and men, even though the records have rarely survived. Credit transactions involving women routinely crossed boundaries between status groups. Men borrowed across status groups as well, but it is easier to discern this pattern for women because the clerks tended to give women titles more often than they gave titles to men. Jacob van Overdwater, perhaps the same man who was the financial administrator of the city in the mid-1350s, borrowed fifteen shillings from a woman named Kateline van der Sluus.90 Avesoete van Overdwater, his surety and probably a relative, promised to pay that debt. She was addressed as Joncvrouw, and Kateline van der Sluus was not, a likely indication that the Van Overdwaters were from the middling or elite stratum of Ghent society, while Kateline van der Sluus, despite the money at her disposal, was of lower status. Creditors were sometimes of higher status than borrowers were. Joncvrouw Avezoete Ute Merham and her brother Godeverd successfully sued Kateline Vossaerds for three and one-half pounds groot. Several Ute Merhams were aldermen and tax farmers during this era, while the name “Vossaerds” was not so prominent.91 Judging by their surnames, some women creditors may have come from the same families as some of the most prominent political and economic leaders of Ghent. Joncvrouw Avesoete van den Pitte, for example, has the same surname as a number of aldermen, tax farmers, and cloth merchants.92 Avezoete loaned nine pounds groot to Zegher van Zele and Mergriete his wife, a couple that bore the same surname as Jacob van Zele, a grain merchant and tax farmer.93 Joncvrouw Mergriete, widow of Pieter van den Spieghele, a hosteler, paid fifteen shillings to a Mergriete Sels (likely an alternative form of Van Zele).94 A Mergriete Zels, perhaps the same woman, invested fifty-two shillings groot of an orphan’s money in 1352. Her sureties were Diederic Uten Dale and Jan Parijs, from two other prominent families.95 Interactions of moneylending and support between members of urban elite families were probably a natural outgrowth of their social connections.

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 99

2/9/2011 12:36:36 PM

100

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Noblewomen frequently appeared as debtors, for their own debts and those of their spouses. Many of these noblewomen borrowed from urban elite women, and even middling women.96 Other women creditors and debtors were less well connected, even though they sometimes handled large sums of money. Mergriete Wittebaerds sued Mergriete van den Wielkine, as surety for her daughter Amelberghe, for a debt of fiftythree gulden. This sum is more than eight pounds groot, or more than a year’s wages for a master mason. None of these women had any apparent connection to prominent elite or patrician families, nor were they using property of deceased husbands or male relatives, and yet the amount of money owed is substantial. These credit relationships between persons of different social strata may have been a source of tension in practice. Wealthy urban elite women had money to lend, but they seem to have been canny businesswomen who were not too shy to sue delinquent debtors. With inf lation, declining incomes, and uncertain markets causing personal concerns, some men may have applied the stigma of usury to women’s moneylending. In addition, when women of means invested their wealth in loans, they were providing capital for someone else’s economic ventures rather than organizing and managing those economic ventures themselves. Women’s financial investment was critical to capital formation, but women creditors were themselves one step removed from the commercial enterprises they financed. Women chose these investments because they were available and profitable, while many avenues were closed to them—longdistance commerce, investment in rural land, and guild mastership, as the next chapter will show. Yet what is most striking about women’s moneylending in the midfourteenth century is how much it was like the moneylending of average men. Like most men, women did not often participate in the highest levels of the credit market, in long-distance trade, in the largest loans to the city, and in loans comprising more than twenty pounds groot to private individuals. Like most men, women borrowed and loaned money at all stages of their lives. Men were willing to borrow from women and to extend credit to them as long as those women had property or sureties to guarantee repayment of the loan, the same standards that they applied to other men. The aldermen enforced the responsibility of both men and women to pay the debts of their present or late spouses, making women creditworthy. Women and men of different social groups loaned to and borrowed from each other, and women were not more likely than men to engage in credit relationships with family members or other women. One-quarter of the 741 debt contracts and acts in the aldermen’s registers

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 100

2/9/2011 12:36:36 PM

C R E DI T A N D C I RC U L AT ION

101

between 1339 and 1361 include at least one woman acting in her own name, even though the amounts of money involved in these acts were, on average, many times the annual earnings of most men. Women were not equal to men in the credit market in any way, but when they loaned and borrowed money, the size of their purses mattered more than their gender.

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 101

2/9/2011 12:36:36 PM

9780230104952_06_ch04.indd 102

2/9/2011 12:36:36 PM

CHAPTER 5 MARRIED PARTNERS AND SINGLE WOMEN AS PRODUCERS AND SELLERS

A

round 1330, Jan van Boendale, a clerk in Antwerp, wrote Der leken spieghel [The Laymen’s Mirror], one of the earliest poems written in the Flemish vernacular for a secular urban audience.1 Marriage, Boendale wrote, is a “noble good,” because husbands and wives live virtuous, worthy lives and have children “whom they turn to God’s service and to their honor.”2 Clerics must remember, Boendale continued, that “whatever clothes, drink or food” they have originated from married people: . . . [I]f the merchant did not sell All the goods from where they are won [i.e., made or grown] And carry them to where they can not be found, Then what would these [religious people] eat, Or what would they wear? If they had to leave their cloister . . . And work up a sweat So that they would have clothing and food Like those who are married do every day, Those who earn by their great labor Everything that the world needs. Those are all the reasons that Marriage should be prized Above all other manners of life that I know. . . .3

An early example of the new Flemish bourgeois literature, Boendale’s text must be read not only as a ref lection of the attitudes of his urban contemporaries, but also as an attempt to construct or promote values, especially civic virtues, or “bourgeois morality,” such as hard work, independence, and down-to-earth practicality.4 Boendale promotes a

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 103

2/9/2011 12:36:11 PM

104

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

moderate, sober adaptation of aristocratic manners in place of the grosser practices of the lower orders. Boendale frames work with an understanding of marriage as an economic partnership and thereby places value on women’s labor. The poem never mentions women living and working outside of the marital household, even though thousands of economically active women in Antwerp and Ghent were single.5 Extolling marriage and criticizing religious people can also be read as encouraging bourgeois women not to remain single or become beguines. Marriage harnessed the productive capacity and wealth of women firmly to the family, under the control of a husband. While Boendale is not critical of women, his work mirrors the conf licting views that made the access of women to work contradictory and provisional. Acceptance of women’s public performance of legal and economic acts coexisted with patriarchal views about the division of labor. Large numbers of women in Ghent, as well as in other Flemish, German, and northern French cities, worked in a wide array of occupations in craft production and distribution.6 As Der leken spieghel highlights, wives were expected to contribute economically to the household. Under the burgher construction, when a wife earned money by a public performance, her husband was likely to feel pleased rather than threatened. However, even though most Ghent men had a relatively liberal view of women’s economic activities, few would have argued that women should compete with men for work on equal terms.7 Crisis in the wool cloth industry heightened the tension between these two views. Under economic pressure, some women may have been more assertive in their attempts to secure work and make a profit, testing and exceeding the boundaries placed around women’s activities in the burgher construction. To men who were unemployed or underemployed, women workers were a convenient target. Gender was a visible distinction, and men who argued that women should be controlled tapped into a deep reservoir of support from various patriarchal traditions. The same issues of ownership, management, performance, and the tension between burgher and patrimonial ideas that affected the property and credit markets surrounded the economic activities of women in craft production and distribution. However, I cannot make statistical comparisons about craft production and marketselling as I did for property and credit, because there are relatively few acts that explicitly mention products and occupations in the mid-fourteenth-century aldermen’s registers.8 In addition, most of the medieval guild records from Ghent were destroyed in the sixteenth century. Qualitatively, however, some Ghent acts are quite revealing. The surviving evidence shows that women

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 104

2/9/2011 12:36:11 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

105

in Ghent did not occupy the highest levels of craft production, just as they did not occupy the most profitable economic niches of tax farming, investment in rural land, and city finance. While there were a few exceptional women, the highest levels of almost every craft were reserved for men, as were international trade and other favored economic niches. The guild structure explicitly limited the activities of women, although not nearly as much as it would in later centuries. Although many guilds admitted women, no guild placed them in positions of authority (at least above the level of inspector), because those positions were linked to political power.9 While most men were also excluded from the top echelon of craft production because of boundaries based on wealth and status, there was a clear gender boundary around positions of authority within guilds. There was a ceiling on women’s economic activities in Ghent, and in the sector of craft production, it was anything but glass. There are three conceptual approaches I have used to assess the access of Ghent women to economic opportunities in craft production and trade. The first involves ways of identifying women’s labor when it occurs within male-headed households.10 Rather than disregarding it or trying to disentangle the work of married women from that of their husbands, I will consider the work of the couple together when the sources show that both the husband and wife were involved in an economic activity, and compare it to the work of men and women alone. This approach, I believe, more faithfully mirrors how medieval Ghent women regarded their own labor. Secondly, I employ Martha Howell’s strategy of comparing the status of work, because it offers the most useful approach to labor in the absence of statistics.11 However, I will also include the amount of authority a woman had to direct the work of others as a measure of status. For example, spinning was a low-status occupation, but a spinster who bought enough wool to supply several other spinsters and sold their combined production at a profit had a higher labor status than the poorer spinsters who worked for her. Weaving was a high-status occupation in Ghent, but the highest status went to those weavers who supplied raw materials to their poorer guild brethren and sold the cloth manufactured by dozens of others on the international market.12 Persons with the same occupational titles could operate on very different status levels, depending on the amount of authority they had to direct the work of others. Finally, I analyze the gender constructions of the workshop and market spaces through the lens of Michel de Certeau’s theory of space.13 Certeau’s ideas offer a way to look at fragmentary sources of actual practice in relation to normative sources, such as market or guild regulations, which he identifies as strategies. He said that a place, defined as the

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 105

2/9/2011 12:36:11 PM

106

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

combination of a physical location and strategies, was transformed into a space by the operations and everyday tactics of historical subjects. A few of their stories, or traces of these operations on places, can be found in court decisions and contracts, such as those preserved in the annual registers of the aldermen. I look first at workshops as sites of production and then at market spaces to recover a few of these stories and operations. Productive Space: Partnership and the Household Shop in Wool Cloth Production The hundreds of husband-and-wife economic partnerships in the records of the aldermen of the Keure attest to the currency of Boendale’s portrait of the productive married couple. One act from 1360 reveals how economic partnership worked in a household involved in wool cloth production, the livelihood for 60 percent of Ghent households. After the swift deaths of Wouter van Vinderhoute and his wife, Aechte (probably from plague), a clerk wrote down on parchment the testimony of twelve witnesses concerning Wouter’s and Aechte’s debts, and on the reverse side, recorded an inventory of their property.14 Their household was a middling one, at best moderately prosperous, and the clerk did not mention any children, minor or adult. Wouter and Aechte owned one house and half of another house, together worth seven and one-half pounds groot. They also owned a bed, furnishings made of wood and iron, linen, cushions, and clothing, together worth just over one pound. From their cloth business, there was one completed wool cloth, three wool cloths that were not yet finished, and 114 pounds of wool (in five smaller lots), in total worth approximately eight and one-half pounds groot. Apart from the value of their houses, the majority of Wouter and Aechte’s wealth was tied up in wool and cloth, as were most of their debts. With the rising price of wool and a depressed market for Flemish woolens, they probably only realized minimal profits from the sale of the cloth. They left behind no cash money, and their possessions were fairly modest. As a re-creation of the oral performance of smaller debt contracts, the list of the testimony of witnesses is worth quoting in its entirety. Wouter and Aechte contracted most of the debts they owed together, although each contracted some debts separately. Their creditors were a mix of five men, two women, and one couple, a breakdown that mirrors the gender mix for Ghent creditors as a whole.15 Done the 21st day of August in the year [13]60. Sir Pieter van der Damme swears by oath, [along] with the oaths of his wife, his son Arnold, and his apprentice (for as much as he knows) that

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 106

2/9/2011 12:36:11 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

107

for a lot of work Wouter van Vinderhoute and his wife Aechte owe him [Pieter] between 38 and 43 shillings groot for dyeing . . . Mergriete, wife of Jacob van Lovendeghem, swears by oath that Wouter van Vinderhoute and his wife owe Jacob, her husband, and her 3 lbs. 3 s. 6 d. groot for one-quarter of a sack of wool. Item, Lievin van Omelroden testifies on oath that [___] the wool was turned over [to the couple] but he does not know whether it was paid for. Lievin, his son, [testifies] the same. Ver Kateline de Vos swears by oath that Wouter van Vinderhoute owes her 19 gulden and 1 d. groot, more or less, for silk. Meester Lievin, her son, [testifies] the same. Jan de Blaewere [or “Jan the blue-dyer”] swears on oath that Wouter owes him 43 s. groot for blue-dyeing. Item, Oste, his apprentice, [testifies the same.] As a representative of his mother, Gillis Mond swears by oath that Wouter and his wife owe 23 gulden [___] [for something] they had purchased. Jan de Beisere has proven with [the statements of ] Everdey Robbe and Dierin van der Beke that Aechte Wouter’s wife said that she and her husband owed him [ Jan de Beisere] 42 s. 2 d. groot for butter. It is proved that Wouter and his wife owe Sir Jan Dotter one shilling because of a loan. Item, Dierin van der Beke heard Wouter and his wife state that they owed Kateline Borluut but he does not know how [much.] Item, Pieter van den Damme swears on oath that Aechte van Vinderhoute, wife of Wouter van Vinderhoute, declared that she owes Lodewik van der Eeke 5-1/2 gulden. Boudin van Vinderhoute testifies on oath that Aechte, wife of Wouter van Vinderhoute, said that she owed the money for four warps to Kateline Borluut, less four shillings that Kateline had received on that account.16

This remnant of oral operations shows that Wouter and Aechte owed, in total, more than seventeen pounds groot.17 Since their houses, business assets, and possessions were worth just under eighteen pounds groot, they owed almost as much as they owned. This may be too drastic a picture of the situation, however, because there were no witnesses who testified to the debts they owed to Wouter and Aechte. Unless they were forced to do so, of course, debtors had no incentive to volunteer testimony of debts they owed. The creditors may have similarly overstated their claims. Nevertheless, the portrait presented here of a draper couple being squeezed by the high price of wool, high production costs, and the low price for finished cloth accords well with the bleak picture of the Ghent textile industry in the mid-fourteenth century.

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 107

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

108

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Most of Wouter’s and Aechte’s debts were for purchases of raw materials or services on credit. Creditors and debtors made these oral debt “contracts” in front of witnesses, who would later be expected to testify.18 Debtors also paid their creditors in front of witnesses. In this case, the witnesses testified that Wouter and Aechte together owed six of the nine debts. Wouter alone owed two (for silk and blue-dyeing), and Aechte alone owed two (one for winding warp threads on a loom and one unspecified). The witnesses seem to have been careful to limit their testimony to what they actually saw and heard (“the wool was handed over, but he does not know if it was paid for,” for example). Unless they lied, therefore, their testimony was probably their recollection of the actual circumstances. Hence, if the witness testified that Aechte contracted a debt, it is most likely that she performed the public act of contracting the debt without her husband, even when her actions directly contradict the provisions of the Ghent custom redacted in the sixteenth century.19 The casual reference to her authoritative capacity in the document indicates that married women entering into contracts for a business they shared with their husbands was routine, unexceptional, and legally binding in the eyes of male and female Ghentenars, the aldermen, and their clerks. But although both Wouter and Aechte sometimes acted alone, in most cases, they contracted these purchases on credit together, suggesting that the bias of creditors was not so much to have the husband swear to a debt as to have both spouses do so. Family partnerships were also apparent with those who did business with Wouter and Aechte. Two sons were apparently working with their mothers, with the mother as the dominant party. When Kateline de Vos testified that the Van Vinderhoutes owed her for a silk purchase, her son supported her testimony in the same way that apprentices had supported their masters’ testimony in other entries. Gillis Mond appeared as a representative of his mother, who was the actual creditor. Mergriete van Lovendeghem testified that she and her husband together had sold wool to Wouter and Aechte on credit. The wife and son of Sir Pieter van Damme swore to full knowledge about the debt Wouter and Aechte owed to Pieter, while Pieter’s apprentice only swore to partial information (“in so far as he knows”). In daily operations, the aldermen and their clerks seem to have taken for granted that wives knew all about their husbands’ businesses. Although the inventory does not list an occupation for Wouter or Aechte, their activities indicate that they were drapers, the organizers and managers of wool cloth production. Their inventory included four textiles [laken] in various stages of the production process, and their debts revolved around the production of cloth from raw wool.20 They bought

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 108

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

109

raw wool and butter (which was used to grease yarn) in bulk, paid a woman to wind warp threads on a loom, and paid to have cloth dyed, all activities that drapers typically financed and supervised. Drapers owned the wool, and later the cloth, worked by others, and as organizers of production, they were critical to the clothmaking process in Ghent. Luxury wool cloth production was divided into as many as thirty highly specialized crafts, each performed by a different set of craftspeople, usually in different small household shops.21 Besides fronting the money to pay for the wool, drapers either hired porters to carry the wool, yarn, or cloth to and from the household shops of the various artisans, or did this themselves. Drapers also had to negotiate scheduling and pricing and pay artisans for their work. Since the production process was quite timeconsuming—it took a year to produce the highest quality cloth—drapers had to wait for their profits.22 Wouter and Aechte seem to have financed their operation by purchasing raw materials and labor on credit, probably planning to pay off their creditors when the completed cloth was sold. Analysis of their draping business reveals not only gendered practices of household productive space but also nuances understandings of the Ghent wool cloth industry as a whole. From the eleventh century, production of wool cloth for export had been the driver of the Ghent economy and the basis of mercantile wealth, urban growth, and the city’s political clout.23 While historians once believed that overdependence on English wool imports, overspecialization, and guild protectionism destroyed Flemish drapery production, studies over the last twenty years have emphasized the f lexibility and innovation of the drapery guilds and the diversity of wool sources and cloth products.24 One concern has been the identity of those who directed, managed, and profited from the production and sale of cloth. Rather than a single group of “merchantentrepreneurs,” historians now believe that by the mid-fourteenth century, two different groups directed cloth production: one, a group of merchants, wholesalers, and brokers, dominated export merchandising; and the other, drapers, or “weaver-drapers,” financed and supervised production of the cloth. 25 Because wool was so costly and competition so fierce, most of the profits from wool cloth went to cloth merchants and wholesalers, who also profited from supplying raw materials to their fellow weavers. Lesser profits were made by common “weaverdrapers” who bought wool, managed the production of cloth up to the final finishing stages, and then sold the cloth in the Cloth Hall. Cloth merchants held high status, while drapers held middling status. Some women worked as drapers in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, but as the elites of the weavers’ guild established their control over merchandising and draping, women drapers, who could not be members

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 109

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

110

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

of the weavers’ guild, were largely excluded from the more profitable sectors of wool cloth production and international merchandising.26 The weavers used their political and economic clout to keep those who were not guild members from major management roles in cloth production, and they kept the wages and profits of other cloth production guilds (like the fullers) modest. The remnant of oral operations surviving from Wouter and Aechte’s economic life both illustrates and complicates this narrative. As Wouter was probably not a member of the weavers’ guild, there was apparently still room in the mid-fourteenth century for drapers who were not master weavers.27 Aechte appeared with Wouter when he purchased supplies and services on credit, and she contracted the services of the warp-winder (Kateline Borluut) alone. Aechte may have also shared the numerous managerial responsibilities of draping, especially by helping to make important arrangements and contacts with other women. Although Aechte was not acting alone, as some of the women drapers of the thirteenth century did, her presence as an active partner of her husband suggests that women were still active as drapers in fourteenth-century Ghent.28 The marginal profits that Wouter and Aechte gleaned do show, however, that drapers were at a disadvantage compared to elite male merchants at the top of the weavers’ guild. These merchants sometimes advanced the money to drapers to buy raw materials and to pay workers.29 As a silent party, the merchant would provide the money to purchase the wool, and the draper would hire different craftspeople to make it into cloth, which he or she then turned over to the merchant. Many drapers slid into dependent credit relationships with elite financiers, as the debt acknowledgement of this widow suggests: . . . Mergriete sPloughers, widow of Heinric van Oedonc, declared that while he was still alive, Heinric and she had together bought two sacks of wool from Jurdaen SerSanders, at a sum of approximately nineteen pounds groot . . . on this agreement and condition: that Heinric and she would prepare the wool and make cloth out of it. And with the cloth made from this wool they would pay Jurdaen that money.30

The scion of a prominent patrician family, Jurdaen SerSanders served three times in the 1340s and 1350s as an alderman of the Keure.31 Heinric van Oedonc and Mergriete sPloughers were at best middling craftsmen. Mergriete knew enough about the draping business to step into her husband’s place, and Jurdaen SerSanders obviously expected that she would be able to fulfill the contract. Both of these conditions point to her involvement in draping alongside her husband before his death, as well

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 110

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

111

as showing how merchants like Jurdaen SerSanders absorbed most of the profits from the wool cloth industry. Draping in Ghent was not a high-status occupation, but because the drapers financed, managed, and directed the work of others, it conveyed middling status. Partnership of a husband and wife had potential advantages for this trade, because a large part of the drapers’ job was to manage the labor of other workers. Drapers had to arrange for the wool to be processed into thread by hiring washers, sorters, greasers, carders, combers, stretchers, and spinners, occupations that were largely female and extremely time-consuming, and conferred low status and low pay. 32 Spinning alone required about 500 hours of labor, roughly half of 1,033 hours required to make a cloth, while weaving took only 80 hours. 33 Estimates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicate that one horizontal broadloom provided employment for approximately fifteen persons, most in these preparatory jobs. 34 Little is known about spinsters, the vast majority of women who worked in the wool cloth trade. Many of them lived in the city itself, and may have worked part-time, combining wool working with childcare, household responsibilities, and other occupations. Drapers used a form of the putting-out, or subcontracting, system from the thirteenth century onwards, but most of the evidence, and hence our knowledge, about how the system operated before the sixteenth century comes from civic ordinances.35 These rarely mention spinsters, and only then to prohibit them from buying wool or making cloth.36 Historians’ focus on prominent male merchants (as early capitalists) and on sixteenthcentury evidence has produced a gendered notion of the putting-out or subcontracting system, with urban men as financiers and organizers, and women (urban or rural) as poorly paid spinsters, carders, or combers. Women in the Low Countries worked on both ends of the early subcontracting system, both as drapers and spinners.37 Aechte may have organized and managed the network of craftswomen who prepared and spun the wool Wouter and she owned, or the couple might have managed this network together. In either case, she bore at least partial responsibility for negotiating with fifteen or more craftswomen; supplying the wool; inspecting the work; and paying the many carders, combers, and spinsters needed to make yarn for weaving. Aechte also negotiated work with the warp-winder, Kateline Borluut. Borluut’s occupation, winding the warp threads on the frame of the loom, was a separate specialty from weaving, and although the warp-winders were not organized in a guild, it evidently paid better than spinning.38 The weaving itself took two workers, who were usually, but not always, male because of the size and weight of the horizontal broadbeam loom.39

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 111

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

112

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Some of the women who worked as warp-winders; spinsters; and sellers of wool, yarn, and cloth were probably daughters, wives, or widows of weavers and other cloth guildsmen. Many women also worked in dyeing, which was organized into two different guilds: dyers and blue-dyers.40 Dyeing was a relatively profitable trade, and although women could not be masters in either guild, there were many women dyers in fourteenth-century Ghent, and some were quite prosperous. Women appear as partial owners of blue-dyeing establishments (blauwerien) in the aldermen’s registers. In 1358, Jan de Visch sold a blue-dyeing establishment, half of which belonged to him and half of which belonged to his minor niece, for whom he was guardian, to a husband-and-wife economic partnership, Jaquemarde den Blauwere and his wife Aeghte.41 In dyeing, women had access to a profitable, middlingstatus trade, which they could either work alone or in a husband-andwife economic partnership. However, the two dyers’ guilds were the only guilds in the wool cloth production sector to which women enjoyed extensive access. The remaining steps in the cloth-making process were, and apparently had always been, dominated by men. Fulling, because of the physical strength involved, was exclusively male. Tenterers, who stretched the cloth onto frames for drying and shaping, were also male. The remaining processes, commonly grouped together under the rubric of “finishing,” were only performed on luxury cloth. Shearers used teasels to raise the nap and then removed it with meter-long scissors. Trimmers, burlers, folders, and edgers smoothed and trimmed the cloth.42 There is no evidence that women ever regularly practiced any of these occupations, although wives probably assisted their husbands.43 Thousands of Ghent women worked at the low-status, nonguild occupations of spinning and preparing yarn, and few worked in the high-status, guild-organized finishing occupations, except as assistants in household shops. However, women also had access to a number of middling-status occupations, such as draping, dyeing, and warp-winding, both in their own names and as part of a husband-and-wife economic partnership. Outside of the cloth industry, most craft production in Ghent was for local sale and consumption. Women worked in some of the smaller cloth guilds that produced only for the local market: the doublet makers, embroiderers, and linen workers.44 Almost all Ghent guilds honored a widow’s right to continue her deceased husband’s craft.45 While some guilds excluded daughters of masters, they were admitted to the guilds of the tailors, stockingmakers, beltmakers, white leatherworkers, fruitmongers, pursemakers, glovemakers, and tin casters.46 The barbers, spice merchants, red candlemakers, mercers, wagoners, and old clothes sellers

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 112

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

113

admitted women and men who had no familial connections to the guild, as well as children of masters. Women could acquire the “freedom” of these guilds, which was not the equivalent of mastership but still allowed them to work in these middling-status crafts as skilled practitioners. Since guild attempts to control crafts through regulations and civic ordinances were not yet systematic, most still allowed women and other outsiders to practice the crafts and sell goods in exchange for payments to the guild.47 At the same time, real power and profits were monopolized by a small elite at the top of these guilds. Although guilds were powerful and most marginalized women, their presence did not necessarily mean that men had strong work identities while women had weaker ones. Many people in late medieval Ghent did not have fixed occupational identities. Prominent men often practiced more than one occupation, some men belonged to more than one guild, and others changed their guild affiliations.48 In an interesting contrast to the argument that women’s work at several occupations was a mark of the marginality of their labor, historians now argue that the f lexibility of guilds and individuals was the key to survival and profit in the changing economic conditions of late medieval Ghent.49 Switching between occupations to take advantage of new opportunities was something that both men and women did, and it occurred at the heart of the economy, not just on the margins. Ghent women did not have the firm guild identities that translated into the political realm, but their pursuit of multiple economic activities was a useful survival strategy for their families. The barbers and the spice merchants were extraordinarily even-handed in their treatment of women who had guild rights. The fourteenth-century statutes of the barbers allowed anyone, “woman or man,” including outsiders to the city, to work as barbers after paying a fee to the guild.50 In two separate cases from the early years of the fifteenth century, men petitioned for admittance to the barbers’ guild because their wives were daughters of barbers. One claimed that he had seen a written document saying that “whoever takes and marries a free barber’s daughter . . . should be free in the guild to do like other free barbers.”51 After denying his request, the guild leaders granted entry to his wife alone. In the second case, the guild dean specified that the husband could serve an apprenticeship under his wife.52 This is a remarkable reversal of the familiar pattern in which men gained entry into a guild by marrying the widow or daughter of a master.53 For a wife to be named as the official practitioner of a guild craft, charged by the guild leadership with training her husband, indicates that the Ghent barbers favored the burgher construction. A woman could directly exploit her hereditary rights and training to achieve “freedom” in this middling-status guild.

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 113

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

114

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Most women did not have the training or the family background necessary for access into those guilds that would admit them. They had more opportunity in occupations that were not organized into guilds, and they were particularly active (if not so well paid) in services and retail commerce.54 Some also worked as painters and miniaturists, bricklayers’ helpers, appraisers for estate property, and glazers.55 Women had access to work in many more crafts because most production took place in the space of the household shop, which overlapped with living space.56 Wives, daughters, and servants moved freely from living space to productive space, and performed a mixture of productive and household tasks. While individual tasks might be considered “men’s work” or “women’s work,” women and men performed those tasks in the same physical location, which meant that their everyday tactics and operations interacted to found and articulate the space of the household shop. Family women were expected to work at the household craft, although it is likely that fewer girls than boys were formally apprenticed.57 Women began as daughters learning the craft from their parents, and as single young adults they were most likely to work in a household shop for their families or an outside employer. Men and women commonly delayed marriage until their mid-twenties, when both spouses could contribute financially to the establishment of a household.58 In the Ghent marriage market, a woman’s skills and work experience might have been just as important to her future husband as her wealth was.59 A married woman’s household responsibilities might have prevented her full-time work at a craft, especially if she had small children, and she might switch to working at her husband’s craft if her labor was needed there.60 Working in shops connected to households meant that women had to balance household and production tasks, not choose between them, and having two persons as partners to manage a shop could be a real advantage. Wives could wait on customers, make financial arrangements with suppliers, and keep accounts and records, all tasks that a craftsman might hesitate to delegate to a journeyman or an inexperienced son.61 A 1338 ordinance for the smiths’ guild forbade any smith or his wife to hire an apprentice of another master on the penalty of twenty shillings, “unless the master or wife explains under oath that they did not know” about the apprentice’s contract.62 The wife of a master craftsman often played an active role in the practical management of the shop even when the craft (such as weaving) was largely male-dominated, and even in trades (such as smithery) that required a great deal of physical strength. Daughters who did not marry probably continued to practice those crafts they had learned at home. Other single women probably worked as

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 114

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

115

employees of men or other women, and some headed their own households. They may have lived and worked together in households as they did in thirteenth-century Paris and fifteenth-century Ghent, and as beguines did throughout the Low Countries during the Middle Ages.63 Whether she married or remained single, a woman gained experience as she worked, just as a man did. Craftswomen followed a continuous parallel track to craftsmen, although a woman’s track was less institutional, less secure, and less noticeable, and their work was contingent upon the approval of male household heads and guild leaders. Wives who worked together with their husbands in an economic partnership acquired part of the power, status, and profits from the trade the couple practiced. Even when we can point out that Wouter and Aechte did some things alone, their activities are so intertwined that separate evaluation is meaningless. Aechte was not working independently, but she was something more than an assistant. She may have been subordinate to her husband, but she was superior to everyone else in the household shop, including any journeymen her husband might employ. She was the one who would inherit the majority stake in that business if he died; she was the one who might have to preserve the household and its resources for the children. She acquired craft status from her husband as the delegate of his authority, but it gave her status nonetheless. As long as production took place in household shops, the chance for this type of husband-andwife economic partnership was possible. The support of most Ghentenars for the burgher construction made it even more possible. Marketplaces: The Work of Women, Couples, and Men in Distribution Market space has been the subject of much study, because it was so crucial to the functioning of the medieval urban economy, and because it shared a multiplicity of functions—political gatherings, official pronouncements, assembling of the militia, guild demonstrations, riots, punishment, and religious processions.64 The presence of large numbers of women performing economic activities and interacting with male and female businesspersons and customers in central, public space was, like their appearances before the aldermen of the Keure, a definitive characteristic of gender relations in medieval Ghent. Although elite men controlled the highest echelon of sales, women could be legitimate marketsellers in their own right in specific niches. This gave numerous women the chance to attain a middling level of prosperity. In the Cloth Hall, women stallholders and clothsellers held entrepreneurial positions at the middling, local, and retail levels of the wool cloth

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 115

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

116

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

trade.65 The top f loor of the fourteenth-century Cloth Hall was reserved for sales of luxury cloth. The lower f loor housed sales of cheaper grades of cloth known as white and blue cloth, and wool.66 On each f loor, stalls or benches lined the walls. Specific women held a lifelong right to the stalls and places on the benches.67 Brokers and cloth wholesalers (lakensniders) handled larger sales to foreign merchants. A 1338 ordinance narrates that the brokers control the Cloth Hall, as they are the ones allowing women to sell the white and blue cloth in the lower hall.68 If “the women” brought more than fifteen stones of wool (equal to ninety pounds), the sale had to go to a broker, who would receive half of the profit. Although this ordinance kept women stallholders out of large wholesale deals, they could still sell wool in smaller quantities, the size purchased by average drapers. Wouter and Aechte van Vinderhoute, for example, possessed four lots of wool weighing between eighteen and thirty-five pounds.69 Brokers purchased bulk wool in large sacks, but then sold the sacks to the women sellers in the Cloth Hall and to other smaller dealers. These intermediary or retail sellers would then break up the sacks of wool to sell to drapers. These women occupied a crucial central niche in the sales and distribution of wool cloth production. However the women sellers in the lower hall had to defer to male brokers for large sales. The text of the ordinance narrates that elite men controlled the market space, and wool and cloth resources; and only allowed women to perform auxiliary roles. Beneath the text may be an older existing spatial practice in which women stallholders had been selling wool and cloth in the Cloth Hall for centuries. In addition, the market rules or strategies partitioned the space of the Cloth Hall by gender in a way that has been read as limiting women’s access to the cloth trade.70 However, I argue that the women stallholders may have experienced the partition of the hall space as a bridge rather than a barrier to prosperity. The structure of space—women behind tables and men standing in the center—actually encouraged the cooperation of the two in order to show cloth to potential buyers. Although the ordinance underlines the authority of the brokers, in earlier practice the brokers and women stallholders may have been more equal. Furthermore, women seem to have held on to their stalls for life and had a role in designating their successors. Two acts in the aldermen’s registers suggest that holders had the right to give the stalls to their daughters or other women. Simeon van Aelst, himself a former aldermen, testified that his late wife, Aechte, had performed the transfer of her Cloth Hall stall to Bette van den Wijngaerde before a previous board of aldermen.71 After Simeon testified, the clerk wrote that “the aldermen transferred that stall back to Bette to use for her lifetime.” 72 However, the first transfer took place between the women

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 116

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

117

before the aldermen, and later the aldermen officially granted the stall to Bette. The aldermen’s right to grant stalls to women was likely a graft onto older oral practice, a way of emphasizing their control by approving a long-standing customary practice. The second story makes this even more likely. In 1362, the aldermen decided to grant a place on the bench to the deceased seller’s underage daughters, and ordered the father and guardian to maintain the seat for the girls: Be it known that . . . [the] aldermen of the Keure gave and give to Betkine [Betty] and Kallekin [Kathy], Heinric Gheilard’s children by Mergriete Koens his deceased wife, the same place and bench in the lower hall to sell white and blue wool cloth that Mergriete their mother held as a gift from the aldermen. And on behalf of the children this bench must be paid for and maintained just as it should be.73

While the document narrates that the aldermen gave this selling place to Mergriete and then to her young daughters as a “gift,” giving the selling space to minors rather than adults does not seem in the city’s best interests. The sense that the daughters are inheriting the selling space suggests that the women who held stalls and/or selling places in the Cloth Hall had hereditary rights, at least in part. Although men on their own greatly outnumbered them, both women alone and husband-and-wife economic partnerships sold wool cloth. Eighteen women sold cloth to the city from 1339 to 1361, compared to 166 men.74 A 1374 ordinance referred to brokers of cloth and wool as both male and female [saencoepre ofte saencoepericghe].75 In 1344, the hosteler Jan Scinkel acknowledged that he owed money to Jan Uten Dale and his wife Marie for twenty-five pieces of wool cloth.76 Women and married couples also bought and sold wool: Be it known to all people that Kateline van den Wale, the widow of Staes van den Bossche, the fuller, has declared that she owes . . . Joncvrouw Alijse Monds and Simoen den Vaudere 29-1/2 gulden [about 5 pounds groot] for a good business deal for wool that Staes, who was her husband, and she bought from them. . . .77

The wool sellers were a middling woman and a male business partner, who was apparently not related to her.78 The 1338 ordinance’s identification of Cloth Hall stallholders as “the women” and the appearance of women sellers in the acts from the aldermen’s registers nuances the accepted view that male brokers, wholesalers, and elite members of the weavers’ guild monopolized the sale of

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 117

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

118

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

wool and cloth. Although the ordinances restrict the quantities of wool and grades of cloth women could sell, the status was legitimate and their potential value of their deals was substantial. Even though they were barred from the highest levels, women clothsellers could be entrepreneurs at the level of middling, local, and retail sales. In Ghent’s specialized system of wool cloth production, women clothsellers occupied an important niche in the distribution of raw materials and finished cloth. They occupied an important niche in the distribution system of raw materials and finished cloth for the city’s drapery production. Women were often marketsellers, some as members of the mercers, old clothes sellers, and spice merchants’ guilds.79 In 1360, Clais de Ruddre applied for membership in the spice merchants’ guild, on the basis of his wife’s rights as the daughter of a guild member.80 The guild leadership decided to grant her the freedom of the guild for a payment of twenty pennies groot and a jug of wine, and ordered Clais to serve a four-year apprenticeship with her in order to be admitted. Spice merchants were not the wealthiest of guilds, but they were relatively prosperous, giving the craft middling status. The mercers’ guild offered women the same opportunity.81 In 1360, the mercer Lisbette van den Conkele sued Jan Bollaerd for debts he and his late wife owed to her.82 Those debts amounted to two pounds groot, enough to support a well-to-do orphan for one year. The mid-fifteenth-century guild statutes mention female mercers prominent enough to own their own shops.83 Nevertheless, elite men dominated the most profitable merchandising in the mid-fourteenth-century city: buying large quantities of highly prized imported goods, either as raw materials for the cloth trade, like wool and dye-stuffs, or for consumption, like grain or wine, and then selling it locally. For example, in 1357, Aechte van den Scake bought three bales of alum from Lievin den Amman, a prominent patrician merchant.84 Alum, the substance that fixes dyes in cloth, was a crucial and expensive import. Although Aechte may have resold some of the alum she purchased to other dyers, the largest profits went to Lievin den Amman and the Italian merchants in Bruges who supplied him. Aechte was probably at least moderately prosperous, a businesswoman in her own right, but her business prospects were limited to the middle range of the distribution system. She and other women rarely broke through the ceiling imposed on the economic ventures of most men and almost all women. Many women marketsellers were part of a husband-and-wife economic partnership. For any crafts that required the guildsman to divide his attention between making wares and selling to customers, having two persons who could be trusted with both management and money was a real advantage. A baker or brewer could supervise production while his

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 118

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

119

wife waited on customers or supervised the barmaids, or vice versa. The brewer or baker could have access to an even wider market by having his wife sell loaves at a table in the weekly Friday Market, sending an employee out to hawk his wares in the neighborhood, or advancing a few loaves or pints to a poor woman to sell wherever she could. Under the burgher construction, Ghent artisans expected women to work, and valued the profits from that work, rather than regarding it as a threat to male authority. Conclusion Small-scale retail marketselling has been a traditional women’s occupation as much as spinning. Although these marketsellers operated in public and had some autonomy, they were often poor, particularly if they were selling products that someone else had produced, and their presence in the marketplace was a sign of their desperation. The poorest marketsellers were women who had no skills, no capital, and no one to take care of them. Their equipment was minimal—a cloth on the ground or a basket over the arm—and their position in the market was always tenuous, dependent on producers to give them credit, and the toleration of officials, guildspeople, and shop owners. They did not possess a space, but had to keep moving as they were evicted from one spot after another by the legitimate owners of market space. One step up from these desperate women were legitimate marketsellers, women who had rights to inhabit a certain area of market space on a permanent or continuous basis. They sold from tables in covered market spaces (like the Cloth Hall), or from temporary booths (like the booths in the Friday Market square depicted at the beginning of chapter one), or from the counter in front of their household shops. These women often owned at least part of the wares they sold, either by virtue of their own production as the daughter, employee, or servant of the producer, or because they were one-half of a husband-and-wife economic partnership. It was usually their connection to a guildsman or some other official male producer that gave them the right to occupy that specific space in the market. However, these marketsellers, particularly the wives and daughters, had within their own minds a sense of ownership, legitimacy, and power because their labor contributed to their households. If they were smart and drove a hard bargain, they and their families benefited. They would probably have proudly agreed with Jan van Boendale that they were ones who produced and sold “everything the world needs.”85 Female marketsellers on these two levels probably worked in every medieval town. A large part of the customer base was female as well.

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 119

2/9/2011 12:36:12 PM

120

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

There were perhaps more women selling in public in Ghent and other Flemish cities than there were in many other areas of medieval Europe, and perhaps those women were freer, less deferential, and more assertive in their interactions with men, but they are otherwise familiar figures. What was really different about Ghent was that there was a third level of women marketsellers and producers—those who owned and operated their own businesses. These women possessed a space in marketplaces in their own right, often through their family connections, but not by virtue of their husbands, deceased or otherwise. Lijsbette van den Conkele was one of these women. She may have inherited the mercery business from her father and mother or used the property she had inherited from them to get started in business. She may have been single, married, or widowed, but none of that mattered to those who did business with her. She owned that mercery business, and the Ghent aldermen recognized that fact by identifying her by her own name and title, without adding the name of her closest male relative or her marital status. In both marketselling and craft production, single women or women whose marital status is unknown had access to occupations that carried middling status and were moderately prosperous. They were barred from the top rank of guild occupations and from the newly developing professions, but they were not consigned to the lowest rung of the economy. Under the burgher construction, there was a place for the single adult woman to work and support herself, and perhaps children, family, or friends who were a surrogate family. The ubiquitous presence of these women in the sources of actual practice stands in stark contrast to the literary and normative sources, such as Der leken spieghel of Jan van Boendale, which ignore them, and single men as well. There was a tension between the ideal that women should live and work in male-headed households and the reality of large numbers of women living and working outside of the control of men. Although not all married women were involved in husband-andwife economic partnerships, and some husbands would not allow their wives anything but subservient roles, most wives shared some decisionmaking and management responsibility with their husbands. Marriage did not necessarily interrupt a woman’s economic life if her husband welcomed the income from her labor. She had to take his authority and her additional responsibilities into account, adjusting the balance between necessity, choice, and negotiation. However, she would also gain status and experience by virtue of the power and responsibility she had within the household and the shop attached to it. She would

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 120

2/9/2011 12:36:13 PM

M A R R I E D PA RT N E R S A N D S I N G L E WO M E N

121

continue to develop her managerial and financial skills as she accompanied him to perform important transactions, and would be prepared to take over the business if he died. She might shift occupations, but men did this as well. Property ownership, skills, and mutual decision making gave her economic life as much continuity as was possible in this economically challenging era.

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 121

2/9/2011 12:36:13 PM

9780230104952_07_ch05.indd 122

2/9/2011 12:36:13 PM

CHAPTER 6 THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF THE BURGHER AND PATRIMONIAL CONSTRUCTIONS

I

n comparing women’s economic activities to those of men, the preceding chapters have deliberately focused on the narrow time period between 1339 and 1361 to explore how legal structures and cultural discourses allowed, limited, and supported those activities. This chapter widens the temporal focus to consider how and why women’s economic activities, legal structures, and cultural discourses changed over time. I brief ly examine the origins of the burgher construction before turning to the well-documented fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the early fifteenth century, women were losing access to middling economic niches and their economic activities were increasingly determined by their marital status.1 Although women in the early modern Low Countries seem to have continued to play a larger public economic role than women did elsewhere, by the sixteenth century, the balance had shifted to the patrimonial construction.2 Ghent had fallen more into line with gendered discourses and practices of Europe beyond the Low Countries. The economic position of women depended on the balance between two sets of gendered legal and economic practices and supporting discourses about gender, family, and property. The burgher construction was older, urban, and aligned with the marital property and inheritance customs of Ghent. Women’s authority to act publicly came from their property ownership, which was more important than their marital status. Although there were clear limits, men did not necessarily perceive women’s property management, public legal performance, or work in middling niches as threats. Most men thought that women had the potential to make good economic decisions and act for the benefit of their families. The family was a productive unit, centered around the husband as the head of the family and the wife as his helpmate, advisor,

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 123

2/9/2011 12:36:19 PM

124

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

and lieutenant. The wider circle of the extended family was cognatic, reproducing itself in both the male and female lines. The burgher family depended on all its members, male and female, to protect the family’s property and interests. The patrimonial construction was a competing system of inheritance and marital property customs, landholding practices, and supporting discourses. Although its general features are familiar from ius commune and medieval customs elsewhere, in Flanders, it first appeared with feudal law and noble rural landholding. The patrimonial construction was supported by the learned, clerical, legal, and noble discourses, which cast women’s capabilities and trustworthiness into doubt, even though writers paid scant attention to mundane economic matters.3 Daughters could only detract from family property, because the patrimonial family reproduced itself exclusively in the male line. Daughters’ inheritances were limited to dowries and widows’ to usufruct to preserve property for the patrilineal family or agnatic lineage. A man’s honor rested in part on his authority over the women of his household, which was more important than a woman’s rights to property. Although both constructions existed in the mid-fourteenth century, the acts in the aldermens’ registers were ten times more likely to use the burgher construction (with a woman acting in her own name or a husband-and-wife economic partnership) than they were to employ the patrimonial construction (with an adult woman under guardianship). Looking backwards raises many questions: Did the burgher construction always allow women as much access to legal capability and economic activities? Did women perhaps have even more access to middling-status positions before the fourteenth century? Was the patrimonial construction a new invention (for Ghent) in the fourteenth century? The next section considers these questions for the time period before 1339. The Origins of the Burgher and Patrimonial Constructions The burgher construction existed before the mid-fourteenth century, predating war, plague, and crisis, but there is little evidence about it in Ghent before 1339. Scattered thirteenth-century Ghent chirographs show women working as drapers, dyers, clothsellers, and moneylenders in deals that involved significant sums of money.4 In a chirograph dated October 12, 1299, Guy of Dampierre, count of Flanders, acknowledged that he owed Verghine del Merre, a female citizen of Ghent and “our good friend,” the enormous sum of 880 pounds.5 Verghine had provided twenty lengths of wool cloth to outfit the count and his knights for the

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 124

2/9/2011 12:36:19 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

125

festival of St. Remy, four lengths of blue cloth for his family, and eighteen lengths of striped cloth for the count’s servants. In addition, Verghine had paid 206 pounds to two individuals on the count’s behalf. The comital clerk did not identify Verghine by a male relative or by marital status, but only as a citizen of Ghent. Another chirograph preserves a woman draper’s petition to the count’s commissioners in 1306 involving a piece of wool cloth confiscated and destroyed by the counts’ bailiffs, who were enforcing the Ghent aldermens’ ban on importing wool cloth made elsewhere into Ghent: . . . I, Mergriete van Eeke, beguine, complain to you, Lords, about the underbailiff who is named Michiel . . . [and other persons who] took a length of white wool cloth from me, which I had sent to one of my friends in Antwerp. He would have bought it but it was too expensive, and so . . . he sent me [back] that same cloth by Bette Smeesters. Bette had to stay at her trade, and she sent that cloth to Ghent with other striped cloths. I, Mergriete, and Bette were not in the city when that cloth arrived in Ghent at the Friday Market, and those persons [Michiel and the other bailiffs] seized that cloth and tried to say that it was made outside . . . . To you, Lords, I claim that I have proved sufficiently by a weaver and a fuller that this cloth was made, woven and fulled in Ghent . . . and I bid you, Lords, by God, that you take care of me and investigate this sticky situation, because I have the better case and I have been waiting a long time.6

The beguine Mergriete van Eeke had paid a weaver and a fuller to work on a cloth she owned, or perhaps she had purchased the completed cloth for resale. She sent the cloth to a male associate in Antwerp, and he entrusted it to another woman, Bette Smeesters, a woman with a business [coemanscepe] that included the transportation and sale of cloth. Both of these women were involved in trade between cities and connected to a network of people who bought, sold, and transported cloth. Despite these intriguing chirographs, it would be a mistake to conclude that there was a “golden age” for women drapers and merchants in Ghent before the fourteenth century. The collection in which these two chirographs survive contains many more chirographs recording the economic activities of men, but only a few with the names of non-noble women.7 The 1292 chirograph that lists one woman cloth merchant, Ysabel Longelle, among twelve people selling wool cloth to the Count of Artois is probably more representative.8 Some chirographs from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries suggest that women had access to middlingstatus positions in the cloth industry and credit markets, but there is not enough evidence to determine whether women in Ghent had more or less economic opportunity than in the middle of the fourteenth century.

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 125

2/9/2011 12:36:19 PM

126

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Nevertheless, the partible inheritance and marital community property customs that put so much property and wealth in the hands of Ghent women have been dated back to the twelfth century, and may be much older.9 One of the earliest surviving privileges of the city, issued by Count Philip of Alsace in 1178, stated that fathers could not take property from their children deriving “from the mother’s part.”10 This refers to the importance of inheritance going to the proper “side” of the family, one of the tenets of the burgher construction. The burgher construction was clearly an outgrowth of customs, practices, and discourses from earlier centuries. The patrimonial construction also predated the fourteenth century in the inheritance customs of the rural Flemish nobility, which followed a system of feudal tenure developed between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Before 1000, most rural land in Flanders had been held as allods, or freeholds, which were divided equally among sons and daughters when the parents died.11 Between 1000 and 1150, the Flemish counts led a successful transformation of most of those allods into fiefs to be inherited by a single son in order to prevent subdivision of the lands that supported their knights.12 From 1150 through 1250, the system was modified to give younger sons some income and the noble widow a dower [doarium], usufruct of half of the profits from her late husband’s fiefs. Noble daughters received dowries, and in theory at least, these were only in movable property, unless there were no sons.13 The knight’s family thus retained its fiefs as patrimonial lands, which would pass down only in the male line. By 1350, this patrimonial construction of landholding had been familiar to the Flemish nobility for some time. City land was never held in fief, and Ghent burghers originally had no involvement with feudal landholding practices. However, the division between urban and rural land, and between wealthy burghers and lesser nobles, began to break down in the thirteenth century. As impoverished nobles sold patrimonial rural land to patricians and urban elites in the thirteenth century, burghers became closely involved with the patrimonial construction.14 By the mid-fourteenth century, Ghent patrician and urban elite families owned numerous fiefs, which had become another commodity bought and sold in the thriving property market.15 At the same time and for the same reasons, noble families and urban patricians began to intermarry extensively.16 This intermarriage involved Ghentenars in patrimonial property arrangements, as the feudal rules preserving fiefs for the patrilineal family were incorporated into the city’s custom. Otherwise, the Ghent aldermen would not uphold any arrangements that departed from the marital property

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 126

2/9/2011 12:36:19 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

127

customs of the city. By the 1350s, the estates of most urban elite families were mixtures of movables, urban land and houses, rural allods, fiefs, and annuities.17 The aldermen of the Keure were familiar with both the burgher and patrimonial constructions and likely working on ways to accommodate the intermixture of the two systems from the thirteenth century onwards. Decline in Women’s Economic Activities in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a much larger body of evidence indicates that the burgher construction and women’s access to legal capability and economic opportunities declined in Ghent, as elsewhere.18 The Ghent aldermen’s registers from 1420–21 show that the decline had begun, as fewer women appeared as principals (see Figure 6.1). The participation of women in every activity status shrank from the levels of the mid-fourteenth century, while the percentage of acts with men alone rose from around half to more than three-quarters of the total acts. For a side-by-side comparison, see Table 6.1, which compares the 1360–61 and the 1420–21 registers.19

Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial) 7 1% Represented Women 19 Women in More than One 3% Category Women in Their 3 Own Names 0% 100 16%

Wives with Husbands 17 3% Men Only 474 77%

Figure 6.1 Gender and Activity Status in Economic Acts from 1420–21 Annual Register of Aldermen of the Keure (Sample Total = 620)

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 127

2/9/2011 12:36:20 PM

128

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

Table 6.1 Gender and Activity Status Compared between 1360–61 and 1420–21 Annual Registers of the Aldermen of the Keure 1360–61 Percentage of Annual Total Acts Register: in 1360–61 Number of Acts Register Men Only Wives with Husbands Women in Their Own Names Represented Women Adult Women under Guardianship (Patrimonial) Women in More Than One Category Total

1420–21 Annual Register: Number of Acts

Percentage of Total Acts in 1420–21 Register

210 55 109

48% 13% 25%

474 17 100

77% 3% 16%

21 8

5% 2%

19 7

3% 1%

29

7%

3

0%

432

100%

620

100%

In 1420, women could still perform legal economic acts in their own names, but fewer of them were doing so. The number of wives who appeared with their husbands decreased dramatically, indicating that public performance of economic partnership in marriage was also much less common. The limitation of women’s legal performance is also borne out by the distribution of marital status among women who acted in their own names in the 1420–21 acts (see Figure 6.2). The number of single women and women whose marital status is unknown decreased dramatically, and the proportion of widows in 1420–21 was double that of the mid-fourteenth century (see Table 6.2). The sharpest decrease between 1360 and 1420 was in the numbers of women who were not identified by marital status and/or the name of a male relative. It was much less common for clerks to overlook a woman’s marital status in 1420 than it had been in the mid-fourteenth century. Although the proportion of married women remained close, the clerks often noted that the wife had been empowered by her husband to perform a legal act for him, an explanation that had formerly been uncommon.20 In 1420, marital status was much more important as a determinant of women’s economic activities than it had been earlier. Women’s legal position and their economic sphere shrank even more in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Ghent, the Low Countries, England, France, and elsewhere.21 They were increasingly confined to lower-paid and lower-status occupations, like spinning and domestic service. As assistants of their husbands or “female public merchants”

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 128

2/9/2011 12:36:20 PM

129

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S Religious 3 3%

Widows 48 46%

Unknown 30 29%

Single 9 9%

Married 14 13%

Figure 6.2 Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names, 1420–21 (Total = 104)

Table 6.2

Marital Status of Women in Their Own Names Compared 1339–61 Registers: Numbers of Women in Their Own Names

Percentage of Total Women in Their Own Names for 1339–61

1420–21 Register: Numbers of Women in Their Own Names

Percentage of Total Women in Their Own Names for 1420–21

217 63 81 109 12 9 491

45% 13% 16% 22% 2% 2% 100%

30 9 14 48 3 0 104

29% 9% 13% 46% 3% N/A 100%

Unknown Single Married Widows Religious Mixed Totals

[coopwijven], married women continued to work as marketsellers, shopkeepers, and wage laborers in the cities of the Low Countries.22 However, they were less likely to perform public legal acts. Husbands routinely controlled the personal property of their wives, whose consent was assumed.23 By the sixteenth century, marital status had become the chief determinant of a Ghent woman’s economic life. Ghentenars, and especially those elite male Ghentenars who served as aldermen, arbiters, and guild officials, made the decision to shift from the burgher construction’s looser interpretation of custom to the more

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 129

2/9/2011 12:36:20 PM

130

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

patrimonial construction, which limited women’s legal and economic access. The patrimonial construction was not imposed on them by the state, church, or outside institution, but Ghentenars were inf luenced by causal factors that affected a much wider area, and the decisions they made paralleled decisions made by people across northwestern Europe in this period. In my view, no single factor caused the shift to the patrimonial construction; the change was engineered by a complex of tensions and shifts in consciousness as the early modern period began. I will examine these causal factors in layers, beginning with the outermost layer of demographic, economic, political, and social factors, followed by a cultural layer of shifts in behaviors and discourses, and finally with the innermost layer of legal change and reinterpretation. The Demographic, Political, Economic, and Social Layer The changing fortune of the burgher construction was tied to a number of external demographic, political, economic, and social factors. Some historians have argued that the access of Flemish women to profitable occupations was produced by the demographic and economic needs of the medieval urban environment.24 However, the example of Italian cities, especially Florence, shows that demographic and economic factors—needs for labor in a growing urban economy, or labor shortages created by plague deaths—did not always produce additional economic opportunities for women.25 Although the contrast between the urban and rural work environments for women shows up sharply in Flanders, these internal differences pale in comparison when the economic opportunities for women in Flanders, urban and rural, are compared to those in Tuscany. Similar caution argues against attributing great significance to the Black Death as a spur to women’s employment.26 Because of labor shortages caused by plague deaths, women in the English city of York were able to work in a wider range of occupations and perhaps to make higher wages.27 But the labor shortage that produced those employment opportunities in England did not occur in Flanders, where the deaths from plague were offset by unemployment in the declining wool cloth industry. The Black Death was an overwhelming event for all medieval Europeans, but it was not a strong enough impetus to overcome particular conditions and gender constructions. In contrast, decline in the intensity and continuity of war, rebellion, and factional fighting in Ghent in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries did have a major impact on women’s economic activities. After the establishment of the Three Members regime in 1360, there was far

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 130

2/9/2011 12:36:20 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

131

less street violence from competing guilds or factions.28 As this government incorporated and balanced all of the city’s elite interest groups, it proved to be a stable and durable regime that maintained lasting public peace. The struggle between the Flemish cities and the central government of the count continued, however, with the worst and most costly rebellion in Ghent’s history coming between 1379 and 1385. Ghent’s defeat in this rebellion was a devastating blow to its economy, power, and semiautonomous international standing, and afterwards, Philip the Bold and his Burgundian successors embarked on an extensive state-building project to reduce the autonomy of the cities.29 However, after the terrible losses of the 1379–85 war were absorbed, Ghent did not endure as many yearly drains of men dead or absent because of war and exile.30 More peace and more men meant that there was less economic opportunity for women.31 This is an excellent reminder that “economic opportunity” for women is an overly optimistic way to describe how many Ghent women probably felt about their economic activities in the chaotic fourteenth century. Stark necessity caused by personal tragedy was as much a motivator for women’s economic activities as their personal choices. When peace broke out, the attention of men might have been drawn more forcefully to those middling-level economic opportunities hitherto considered unimportant. If Ghentenars associated increased women’s economic activity with war, social chaos, and disorder, the patrimonial construction might have seemed like a corollary to public peace and social order.32 Changing political fortunes also altered the dynamics of Ghent’s elite groups. By seeking office in the growing bureaucracy of the Burgundian state, and intermarrying with lesser nobility and patricians from other cities, Ghent patrician families transformed themselves into members of a supraregional elite.33 This new class formed its identity in the fifteenth century through office holding, the formation of social networks built on marriage alliances and adoption of noble behaviors and lifestyle. To a family emulating noble behavior, there was less room for a woman to assume public economic roles. Family women were to be ladies, not managers. Flemish bourgeois literature, such as Der leken spieghel of Jan van Boendale, also stressed the importance of women as helpful wives rather than managers. The model of the new bourgeoisie gained increased definition in the sixteenth century, as it drew sharp distinctions between noble excess and bourgeois industry, prudence, and sobriety.34 The nature of bourgeois marriage changed to include the ideal of “conjugal love and affection,” an ideology of companionate marriage built not on passion, but on a shared commitment to manage property, intimacy,

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 131

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

132

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

and domesticated romance.35 In the new bourgeois family, the husband undertook the public roles, while his wife confined her management to the private space of the home or as a consumer in the marketplace. 36 Both of the reconfigured social groups—noble state official and sober bourgeois—abandoned the burgher construction of women’s economic roles for the more narrow patrimonial construction. Neither the noble lady nor bourgeois housewife was supposed to perform public management of property. 37 Economic changes in Ghent also reduced women’s access to economic opportunities. Although there was no serious and prolonged depression in the Late Middle Ages, the period was marked by economic dislocations and a series of serious short-term crises.38 The Flemish wool cloth industry suffered repeated blows from rising costs for wool, shrinking markets, embargoes, and competition as it transformed into a leaner, less profitable industry. The city downsized from one of wealthiest and most pre-eminent manufacturing centers in the north in the thirteenth century to a regional market city by the sixteenth century. Individual and family strategies leaned heavily towards more conservative approaches and patrimonial protection.39 As the economy shrank and transformed, women lost access to middling economic niches. As guilds became increasingly restrictive, women workers in those trades were marginalized.40 One example comes from the blue-dyers’ guild, which had admitted many women in the mid-fourteenth century. In 1402, journeymen complained to the guild leadership that women workers were a threat to their livelihood.41 Besides paying apprentice fees, the journeymen argued, they had “contribute[d] their portion to the taxes and obligations of the guild with their lives and with their property when necessary,”42 referring to the money they paid towards city levies on the guild and their service in the city militia (in guildbased contingents).43 In response, the guild deans protested that “married women or free widows” had been accustomed to working at blue-dyeing “from old times,” and depriving these women of work would impoverish them.44 Nevertheless, the guild leaders agreed that dyeing was “men’s work” and forbade women to take the place of male journeymen.45 The only exception was made on the basis of property, because, as the deans argued, if women could not work, they could not take care of their own property, which would then be neglected and ruined. They allowed any woman to work on her own property and “to see to it as much as she wishes.”46 Women who did not own property but merely worked in dyeing establishments were not so lucky. Provided that the guild effectively enforced this decision, it was a mighty blow to the economic activities of women blue-dyers.

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 132

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

133

This decision also reveals patriarchal attitudes towards women’s work that had probably existed for some time. The journeymen’s argument that women were taking work away from men is familiar as an opportunistic tactic.47 Economic pressure from a shrinking cloth market and increasing competition not only cut into journeymen’s wages, but also drastically reduced their chances of ever becoming masters. Women blue-dyers were a convenient target, and acting at least in part out of their own self-interest, the journeymen characterized women workers as interlopers who did not contribute to the guild. But the response of the guild leadership, and especially their acknowledgment that dyeing was “men’s work” [manneweerc], shows that patriarchal attitudes towards women’s work were prevalent even among those men who worked in a craft that had traditionally employed large numbers of women. The deans believed that women did not have the same right to work in the guild as men did, even while they probably welcomed the wages or profits earned by their wives. Those women who did have a right to work were not single women, but “married women” and “free widows,” women who derived their right to work from their husbands’ status. Because women lacked institutional access to political power, including guild office and mastership, they had to rely on male guild members to give them work and protect their rights. When the leadership of the blue-dyers’ guild withdrew that protection from female guild members, women lost access to the blue-dyeing trade. Women workers lost both legitimacy and access to middling positions in many guilds and nonguild trades during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. City and guild regulations railed repeatedly against women marketsellers, accusing them of selling illegitimately, taking work away from rightful (male) guild members, deceiving the public by selling shoddy merchandise and spoiled fish, and spreading turmoil and disorder.48 After the mid-fifteenth century, no more women appeared as moneylenderpawnbrokers licensed by the city of Ghent.49 In the mercers’ guild, which had included many women in the late fourteenth century, there were no women at all on the 1484–85 membership list.50 Although women still worked, they were now increasingly confined to low-paying jobs or dependent work in male-dominated craft production households. This economic pressure seems to have fallen heaviest on women who were single.51 Because wives were under the control of men and working at middling-status occupations as dependents in male-headed households, their work was acceptable. Widows could carry on a wide range of occupations under the assumption that they were preserving their late husbands’ shops for the next generation. But single women living outside of male-headed households had no defenders, and by the late fifteenth

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 133

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

134

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

century, the gulf between wealthy or middling widows and poor single women was considerably wider in Ghent than it had been in the fourteenth century.52 As chapter three shows, most of the women who purchased annuities in the mid-fourteenth century were either single women or women who were not identified by marital status. But in the late fifteenth century, women identified as widows were the largest single group of investors in annuities, comprising almost half of all buyers of both sexes.53 In tax rolls from the late fifteenth century, the average tax paid by widows placed them in the middle income bracket, whereas the average amount of tax paid by single women placed them into the lowest tax bracket.54 Single women headed 12 percent of the households in the poorest neighborhoods of Ghent in 1492. These two groups—widows living comfortably on the income from annuities and poverty-stricken single women working in low-paying occupations—existed in many medieval and early-modern cities, including mid-fourteenth-century Ghent.55 But what is missing from the late-fifteenth-century picture are the single women and those not identified by marital status who owned substantial property and invested it themselves in economic activities. There were still large numbers of single women living and working in Ghent, but they were no longer prospering. The Cultural Layer Economic contraction, fears of economic loss, guild restrictions, peace, and the evolution of social groups all contributed to the demise of the burgher construction in Ghent. But the change from the burgher construction of women’s economic roles to the patrimonial construction also involved a cultural shift in response to these conditions. The elite men who were chosen as aldermen abandoned the basic principle that women were legitimate public representatives of families in property management and income-producing activities. These men, and probably some women as well, no longer assumed that women’s economic activities in their own names in certain rather unimportant niches were useful for their families. They began instead to focus on concerns that women’s activities needed to be closely supervised by men. The huge increase in the number, length, and variety of sources in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries complicates our re-creation of shifting cultural discourses. Sixteenth-century didactic writers commented on many more issues and topics relating to women than writers from earlier centuries had.56 Medieval church sources from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries had commented regularly on women’s behavior, but

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 134

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

135

were only concerned with a few economic activities of women—spending too much of their husband’s money, buying frivolous clothing, and engaging in usury.57 The fourteenth-century ordinances promulgated by Ghent aldermen rarely mention women, and then usually in connection with prohibitions on abduction (and elopement) and rape.58 The newly emerging Middle Dutch literature primarily dealt with women in their connection to men, as wives helping their husbands.59 This corpus of male commentary on women from the fourteenth century is overwhelmed by a much larger body of literature about women from the sixteenth century. Besides the change in quantity, some historians have argued that there is a change in the tone of didactic treatments of women towards an increased concern with women’s speech, for example.60 While I cannot prove it, I suggest that there is also a change in the attention paid to women’s public economic activities. In the fourteenth century, Ghent men rarely seemed to pay much attention to the mundane economic activities of women, which may have allowed women to stretch the burgher construction’s tolerance. The sharpest cultural change in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may have been that elite men began paying close attention to enforcing male authority and limits on women. In Ghent and throughout northwestern Europe, the need to place women within the structure of the male-headed household or its religious equivalent, the closed cloister, gained tremendous force in this period.61 The more distant a woman was from close male control, the more irregular and suspicious her economic and social activities became. One of the first groups of women to face this increased concern were the beguines. Ghent had four beguinages with thousands of beguines, some of which may be the same single women and women whose marital status is not included in the records of the aldermen of Keure.62 Beguines had from their inception faced criticism for immorality, wandering, reading religious texts in the vernacular, and preaching, although they also enjoyed support from many male clerics. Pressure to confine religious women under the governance of the male clergy and concerns for the orthodoxy of beguines drove the creation of court beguinages (individual houses and courts enclosed by a wall from the outside world).63 In the aftermath of the condemnation and execution of Marguerite Porete in 1310 and the denunciation of beguines by the Council of Vienne in 1311–12, bishops in the Low Countries investigated and exonerated the large court beguinages, like St. Elizabeth’s in Ghent, which were protected by powerful patrons and clerical supporters, but it became almost impossible for beguines to live on their own outside of court or convent beguinages.64 Many smaller beguine establishments closed, and new rules

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 135

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

136

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

restricted beguines’ movements, dress and behavior outside the court. Although Ghent beguines continued to work in the wool cloth industry, at nursing the sick, or teaching, oversight and suspicion probably limited their economic activities. Preserving orthodoxy meant surrendering much of the independence that had characterized the movement in its formative years. Increased attention to marriage as the proper state for women also reinforced the concern that women should live in male-headed households. The concept of companionate marriage emerged in the sixteenth century, as the ideal of love between spouses replaced land as a firm basis for marriage.65 Dutch burgher literature promoted marriage as the proper state for both women and men, and bolstered the authority of the husband and father as the head of household.66 Neither idea was new, but they received increased emphasis after 1500 as distinctions between public and private life developed.67 Broadsides, pamphlets, and woodcuts displayed hen-pecked husbands changing diapers or being whipped by their domineering wives.68 The popularity of these themes show increased concern about maintaining male authority over women in properly -governed households. The rise of capitalism changed the meaning of work in a way that privileged male production over female housework.69 The growth of state structures and Protestantism in the sixteenth century reinforced existing discourses about the importance of fathers ruling over their households. A number of excellent studies have shown how the growth of the state and the early modern bourgeoisie, the development of capitalism, commercial markets, and consumerism, and increased attention to manners affected the gendered division of economic roles.70 The maintenance of properly-ordered households, under firm male paternal authority, formed the basis of public order.71 The social control movements of the sixteenth century increased the marginalization of single women and heightened the connection of a woman’s marital status to her economic activities. Movements valorizing marriage and imposing social control on single women, coupled with the restrictions on occupations, may explain why single women found it difficult to prosper in the sixteenth century. In addition, elite men probably began to view their wives’ public performance of economic activities as embarrassing rather than beneficial. Because these elite men filled the aldermen’s benches as well as governing their own family women, their conversion to the patrimonial construction had far-reaching implications for women’s ability to perform legal acts. The tolerance they had previously extended to women vanished as these elite men began to view women’s economic activities as marks of improper behavior and low social status.

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 136

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

137

The Legal Layer The aldermen’s judgments reveal how they interpreted the unwritten custom at specific moments. In the mid-fourteenth century, privileging property ownership over gender, they routinely allowed married women to manage their own personal property and perform legal acts without an explicit statement of their husbands’ permission. However, in 1419, the aldermen made a very different ruling in a case that pitted a married woman’s right to have a role in the management of her own property against a husband’s right to control his wife and her personal property. Although most Ghentenars probably believed in both of these principles, neither had yet been articulated in any written ordinance or privilege of the city.72 The case began when Raes van den Walle, “as legal guardian of Joncvrouw Kateline Stoppelare his wife,” claimed her inheritance from her late father’s estate.73 The wife’s mother, Kateline Daniels, opposed Raes’s request for settlement of the estate because her daughter “was out of the country and estranged from Raes.” 74 She argued that her daughter was not able to appear to perform the legal procedures required to divide the estate or to give her consent to the quit declaration. Her daughter would be greatly damaged, Kateline senior argued, unless the aldermen of the Gedele allowed a delay for her daughter to return. Raes responded that “he was the guardian of his wife and . . . he was empowered to claim . . . [the inheritance,] for even if she were present, she would still have to be authorized by him, and thus her authority to speak legally would come from him.” 75 Raes claimed the right to control the younger Kateline’s estate because he was her “head, guardian and husband,” and he publicly denied his wife the right to act legally under any circumstances.76 He said that she was estranged from him “for no reasonable cause, but by her own evil will,” having left him deliberately just to deny him his right to the inheritance.77 He then appealed to male solidarity with the aldermen: “for by such ways might many women who have the prospect of good inheritances, in hope of [getting] these, estrange themselves from their marriages and scornfully cast off those people who should have part of the inheritance by right.” He concluded “that would be a bad example, against reason and right.” 78 Raes expressed a sense of entitlement, outrage at being deprived, and complete disagreement with the burgher construction’s idea that the property might be managed by his wife. The case was difficult because it required the aldermen of the Gedele to choose between two principles upheld by the custom—the right of a woman as property owner to be involved in the disposition of that property and the right of a husband to control his wife and her property.

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 137

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

138

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

The aldermen of the Gedele appealed to the aldermen of the Keure, and “after much deliberation” they summoned the Great Council, a larger group containing representatives of all elite interest groups.79 Together, these groups decided the case in Raes’s favor, giving him the profit, use, and management of his wife’s property, but forbidding him to alienate or encumber the immovable portion of it. The aldermen and the larger Great Council did not completely depart from the burgher construction, because they did preserve the wife’s personal property for her family. However, they overrode Kateline’s right to participate in the management of the property division and allowed Raes to control his wife’s personal property against her will and that of her family. This interpretation of the oral custom broke enough new ground that it was enshrined as a precedent in the “Red Book” kept by the aldermen of the Gedele for future consultation.80 The aldermen and the Great Council seem to have found Raes’s patrimonial discourse persuasive. Raes cast the younger Kateline as evil, willful, unreasonable, and greedy. Other women, he implied, long to cast off their rightful duties to their husbands. He was arguing that women could not be trusted to act in the interests of their families, a trust that was one of the cornerstones of the burgher construction. Raes argued that a husband should be his wife’s guardian and her “head,” because he had reason and right on his side. By judging in Raes’s favor, the aldermen and the Great Council, all members of the urban elites, signaled that they found this patrimonial discourse convincing. Their decision marked a shift in priorities to privilege gender over property rights, favoring the patrimonial construction over the burgher construction. During the late fifteenth century, the aldermen interpreted the unwritten custom in ways that further limited married women’s ability to perform legal acts.81 They did not allow married women to perform legal acts without their husbands’ presence and verbal consent or his official written empowerment. Men successfully refused to answer lawsuits by married women without proper documentation, and husbands successfully repudiated debts their wives had contracted without their consent. Clerks used designations like “female public merchant” or “her own woman” [haer selfs wijf ] to explain why a married woman was acting legally.82 Official labels, official categories, and official documents were now necessary to explain legal performance by a married woman. The aldermen’s clerks more often recorded a woman’s marital status as proof of her ability to perform management of property. The professionalization of law led to the redaction of the custom in 1563 into a written, less mutable form that enshrined the patrimonial interpretation of women’s legal capability and property rights. The redacted custom

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 138

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

139

stated that married women could not make legal contracts without the knowledge and consent of their husbands, unless they were “female public merchants, concerning their business and otherwise not.”83 Even though Ghent law retained partible inheritance and marital community property customs, a wife was expressly forbidden to sell, alienate, or encumber her personal immovable property without the “express consent and authority of her husband.”84 The age of majority and emancipation was fixed at twenty-five, and a provision adopted from Roman law restricted the ability of single women to act as sureties.85 The redacted custom not only incorporated the fifteenth-century aldermen’s patrimonial interpretations of the oral custom, but also instituted new limitations on the ability of single women to perform legal acts. As I argued in chapter two, the 1563 redacted custom ref lected the reconstruction of gender norms that had been underway for the past 150 years. Despite the growing role of legal professionals, the inf luence of Roman law does not appear to have been a major instigator for adoption of the patrimonial construction in Ghent. The timing and extent of the adoption of Roman law in the north is a hotly contested issue; some legal historians suggest that university-educated professionals, tutored in Roman law, spread and applied the ius commune widely throughout the north, while northern legal historians argue that the ius propium, local law or custom, prevailed until the sixteenth century.86 Sources of actual practice bear out the argument that the principles of Roman law taught in universities did not make significant inroads into the customary law, interpretation of custom by the aldermen, or clerical procedures before the 1500s.87 By that time, the patrimonial construction already held firm sway in the minds of the Ghent aldermen and male elites. Roman law was a tool jurists found useful in restricting women’s legal activities rather than the source of the jurists’ conviction that women should be restricted legally. Patrimonial language first made its way into burgher customary documents because of mixtures of rural and urban property and issues of legal jurisdiction. When their estates contained both urban property and fiefs, families had to protect their legal acts from challenges based on either the burgher construction, which governed the way movable property, urban land, and annuities were held, or the patrimonial construction, which governed the way feudal property was held. They also had to fashion their legal acts to stand up in the comital courts because of the shifting balance of power between the count and the cities, and even in the French king’s parlements. Otherwise, families could get caught in the middle of battles over legal jurisdiction, as happened in the division of the estate of Mergriete van Steeland in 1353. The aldermen of the Gedele appointed

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 139

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

140

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

her widower, the noble Roeger Brijsteesten, guardian of the couple’s children and the patrician Jan SerSanders, as supervising guardian.88 Jan van Ardericke, husband of Lijsbette van Steeland, Mergriete’s sister, went to the comital court at the Gravensteen castle in Ghent, where the count’s officials appointed him guardian of the children because he was a closer relative than Jan SerSanders. To resolve the resulting jurisdictional dispute, arbiters (a combination of nobles, patricians, and urban elites) worked out a compromise. Roeger, the father, would be guardian and take custody of the children and most of the property. He, in turn, would pay the aunt and uncle, Jan and Lijsbette, 200 pounds parisis per year. In addition, Jan and Lijsbette would manage some rural property until the children reached their majority. By exploiting conf licts over jurisdiction, Jan van Ardericke used his marital connection to the Van Steeland family to secure a healthy income at little cost during the minority of his wife’s sister’s children. If divisions of property or sales contracts were written using the wrong phrases, someone could bring a lawsuit. To protect family interests, clerks began to write legal acts that were mixtures of the burgher and patrimonial constructions. Consider the following act in which an urban elite couple ( Jan and Lijsbette Trijl) sold to the husband’s brother ( Jacob Trijl) a parcel of rural property, held from two different nobles and one monastery, in three different types of tenure. The act begins as a husband-andwife performance using the burgher construction, but the highlighted sentence marks an abrupt shift to the patrimonial construction: Be it known that Jacob Trijl has bought and received from Jan his brother and from Joncvrouw Lijsbette his legal wife the land that is described here . . . and this for a certain sum of money which her Jan and Joncvrouw Lijsbette say Jacob has paid them. Because of this Jan and Joncvrouw Lijsbette hand over the land . . . and Joncvrouw Lijsbette has declared quit, by consent of Jan Trijl, her legal husband and guardian, all the usufruct and right that she ever might have in the land. And if Jan or Joncvrouw Lijsbette do anything or go against this to cause Jacob any loss of use of the land . . . that will be on a forfeit of 500 pounds parisis.89

Before and after the italicized sentence in the middle of this act, the clerk used the burgher construction’s forms for a husband-and-wife economic partnership selling land. But the highlighted sentence could have been taken directly from a land sale in the patrimonial system, in which the wife of the noble appeared only to renounce her usufruct so that she could not later claim it from the new owner.90 And her husband, as controller of her actions, had to give her permission to renounce that usufruct, or the omission might become the basis of a

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 140

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

B U RG H E R A N D PAT R I M O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

141

lawsuit. The urban elite couple had to incorporate the sentence because the land was rural and parts of it were held in feudal tenure.91 The result is a mixed act striving to cover all the legal bases and prevent future legal challenges. In the 1350s and 1360s, urban elite families sometimes employed the patrimonial construction not to control daughters and daughters-inlaw, but to control sons-in-law. If families ignored the dictates of the patrimonial construction, their legal acts were vulnerable to challenge from elite men from other families, such as Jan van Ardericke. Another example comes from 1360, when Willem van Erleghem and his wife Lijsbette made an agreement with their son, one unmarried daughter, two married daughters and their husbands that the parental property would not be divided until both of the parents had died.92 In the first act, the clerk identified the two married daughters by listing their names, followed by their husbands’ names and the phrase “husband and guardian.” 93 The family had the clerk list the married daughters’ names first to prove the active consent of their daughters, a requirement of the burgher construction. The daughters’ names were followed by the names of their sons-in-law and the phrase “husband and guardian,” indicating that the husbands had consented, a requirement of the patrimonial construction. Three months later, when Lijsbette, the third daughter, married Gillis Leuward, the senior Van Erleghems recorded the new son-in-law’s consent, “as legal husband and guardian of Lijsbette,” to the earlier accord.94 They had to add patrimonial phrases to an essentially burgher agreement to avoid possible lawsuits by disgruntled sons-in-law, if not before the Ghent aldermen, then perhaps in a court under another jurisdiction.95 The Van Erleghem family used the patrimonial construction not to control their daughters but to control men who married into the family from the outside. However, the patrimonial phrases, especially “husband and guardian,” also gave those men powerful tools to limit the control of family daughters over their personal property. As Raes van der Walle was to claim in 1419, the husband as guardian implied that a wife could not do anything without her husband’s permission. The ideas of the patrimonial construction may have appealed to urban elite men who were frustrated by female relatives. For example, after the death of his patrician wife, Kateline Borluut, Jan Criekersteen tried to convince his sister-in-law, Eleene Borluut, to let him continue to control a certain property that Kateline and Eleene had inherited from their brother Pieter.96 Eleene would not agree, and the aldermen supported her. When the independent actions of female relatives and the support of the aldermen for those actions frustrated their desire to keep control of

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 141

2/9/2011 12:36:21 PM

142

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

wealth, men like Jan Criekersteen might have become active supporters of the patrimonial construction. Stricter interpretation of women’s legal capability, adoption of patrimonial language to safeguard family assets, and opportunistic desires contributed to this legal change, which paralleled changes in cultural discourses and political, economic, and social practices. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, economic challenges, political peace, social transformations, and cultural discourses made the patrimonial construction more attractive to all social groups. By 1420, the number of women who acted in their own names shrank, and clerks increasingly recorded a woman’s marital status as an explanation for her performance or passivity. By the end of the fifteenth century, women had disappeared from guild occupations in which they had once been prominent, and large disparities opened up between the wealth of widows and single women. By the sixteenth century, Gentenars had resolved the contradiction between the burgher and patrimonial constructions in favor of the stricter restriction of women under male authority and a more patrimonial interpretation of custom. Although Ghentenars undertook this shift in response to internal dynamics and through local legal avenues, changes in Ghent’s gendered economy paralleled those taking place in cities across Europe. Clearly, larger forces were also at work, pulling Ghent more sharply into line with the patrimonial paradigm that limited women’s economic roles.

9780230104952_08_ch06.indd 142

2/9/2011 12:36:22 PM

CONCLUSION

T

he oldest continuous records of ordinary economic transactions between private individuals from Ghent reveal a gender construction that allowed women access to legal performance, property management, and middling-status occupations throughout their adult lives. By focusing on the short period between 1339 and 1361 rather than on the process of change and the more numerous documents from later centuries, I have mapped the contours of this economic gender construction that helped to make Ghent one of the premier wool cloth production centers of Europe. Approaching the customary law as a site where norms are constructed and negotiated, I have used the sources of actual practice to recover mid-fourteenth-century norms while questioning as many assumptions as possible. Statistical analysis, prosopography, and examination of language have shown that many of the restrictions on women’s legal economic acts inscribed in the sixteenth-century prescriptive sources did not exist in actual practice in the mid-fourteenth century. The story of the loss of women’s opportunities and the growth of patriarchy by the sixteenth century has been told by others. But in 1350 that teleological outcome was unknown. Although seeds of the patrimonial construction were certainly present in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent, most Ghentenars seem to have been comfortable with women performing legal economic acts and managing property. Women’s routine access to legal capability, property management, and middling roles in the Ghent economy was a result of their ownership of property and their right to have a say in the management of that property at all stages of their lives. Those rights came from the oral custom of Ghent, which did not so much favor women as treat them as equals of men in certain crucial areas. Both parents had authority over their children, not only the father. Both sons and daughters inherited equal portions of their late parents’ estates. If one spouse died, the other spouse inherited exactly the same property rights and responsibilities. Families relied on their daughters as well as sons to protect the patrimony, and

9780230104952_09_con.indd 143

2/9/2011 12:38:19 PM

144

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

husbands relied on wives not only to preserve the household in the event of their absences or deaths, but also to add to the income of the household by work or canny financial dealings. In the mid-fourteenth-century acts, almost half of the women principals were identified only by their own names, without mention of marital status or names of male relatives. Married women acted in their own names without explanation or statements of their husbands’ consent. Clerks used parallel language and phrasing to describe the presence and performance of men and women. Embedded in these acts is a discourse about women and economic activities, a casual acceptance, a routineness about women’s management of property, debt transactions, marketselling, and craft production. In that discourse, the woman, as the real owner of her personal property, had the right to be involved in the management of that property and all economic activities that f lowed from the investment of that property, whatever her marital status was. In general, Ghentenars seem to have accepted that women had the potential to make good economic decisions and could be trusted to act for the benefit of their families. Nevertheless, the Ghent oral custom constrained women by rigidly excluding them from political authority. In actual practice as well Ghent women almost never held official positions of power over men. The exceptions were noblewomen, the beguine headmistress of a hospital, and the occasional landowning widow who officiated over an act. The extraordinary appointment of Mergriete van Menine as “supervisor” over male receivers required an explanation of the circumstances, and, significantly, it was not repeated. Women did not hold offices in the guilds, because the guilds performed political and military functions, and that exclusion cost women dearly. They had no official representation to defend their rights as guild members when they were challenged by men. Another constraint on women’s activities was more amorphous, and it was not exclusively a barrier against women. Women rarely performed the highly profitable, top-echelon economic activities in what I have termed “elite male preserves”: investment in rural land; international trade in wool, cloth, and grain; tax farming; high-level finance; and elite guild status. Elite men who had access to these preserves often served as aldermen, guild deans, and arbiters, political posts from which they defended their privileged access. Women, even the women from the same patrician and elite families as these elite men, rarely appear in this top echelon of economic activity, and then usually as widows of wealthy entrepreneurs. However, most men in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent did not belong to these small elite networks either. They were also largely excluded from the most profitable levels of international trade and high finance. Gender played a role in limiting access to the top ranks, but patrician or guild

9780230104952_09_con.indd 144

2/9/2011 12:38:19 PM

CONCLUSION

145

elite status, class, political office, and network connections played equally important roles. Outside these elite male preserves, women performed crucial roles in the daily operation of Ghent’s economy. In the Cloth Hall, women handled much of the middle- and low-level sales of wool, yarn, and cloth, breaking down wholesale lots of wool and retailing it to small drapers. They fulfilled a critical function in the production and distribution systems of the city’s wool cloth industry. Although most women worked as low-status spinsters, carders, and marketsellers, quite a few worked at occupations in the middling rung of the Ghent economy. In a disrupted and changing economy, the f lexibility of women’s work and economic activities became a positive asset for their families. Women also invested wealth they had inherited or earned by either lending money or buying annuities. In both cases, they transformed their wealth into capital and circulated it through the urban economy. Although women’s wealth, in the form of dowries, was crucial to all medieval economies, in Ghent, women often invested that wealth themselves, making their management of wealth as important as their ownership. Ghent women led relatively continuous economic lives, shaped by their own choices, talents, and social status; by external circumstances; and by negotiation with their husbands, families, and the aldermen. Women of means could choose to become very involved in the public performance of economic and legal acts, as Lijsbette van Lierde did, or they could choose to allow a husband or male family member to invest their property and handle all public performances, as her stepdaughter Kateline de Mirabello did. Many women, like Clementie Tsuul and Mergriete Scettorf, chose a middle course between these two extremes—an economic partnership with their husbands. Other women, including those from patrician and elite groups, remained single for most or all of their lives, and many were able to support themselves above the poverty level. Women had choices, but the vicissitudes of life also drove their decision making. Many women probably remained single because they had no opportunity to marry, whether because of death from war, rebellion, or plague; economic conditions; or bad luck. The death of a parent could send a young woman scrambling to sell annuities in order to settle her father’s debts, as Lijsbette van der Most did. The exile of husbands might have forced some unwilling women to manage the household property alone. A woman also had to negotiate her choices with the members of her household and family because they had rights to that property also. The foremost among these (at least for the married woman) was her husband. The outcome of those negotiations was also dependent on his choices and the power dynamic between the two, but many Ghent husbands

9780230104952_09_con.indd 145

2/9/2011 12:38:19 PM

146

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

accepted their wives as economic partners. Like Wouter and Aechte van Vinderhoute, they appeared together to buy supplies on credit and swear to repay debts. Like Symoen de Necker, husbands sent their wives to appear in public before the aldermen to carry out a family strategy they had negotiated together. Other husbands appeared for their wives as their “husbands and guardians,” but they were a distinct minority. Although women were deeply affected by changes in their life course, marital status did not determine their economic activities. In many cases, marital status was irrelevant to the aldermen, who were much more interested in the rights of property ownership and contractual obligations. If a woman owned the property in question, publicly performed management of it, and no husband objected, the aldermen treated her as a fully competent legal actor. In the mid-fourteenth century, Ghent was a patriarchal society with a special sphere of possibilities for women. These possibilities were exclusively economic, although women probably derived some social status from them as well. Women enjoyed legal privileges associated with and limited to their ownership of property, although this might have given them increased standing as witnesses for other types of cases as well. Lack of male guardianship over women did not translate into equality. The key positions of power were in the hands of men, and men did not seem to feel threatened by women’s economic activity. Instead, most seemed to regard it as something favorable, something that would add to the wealth of their households, something necessary to the economy as a whole, something normal. To those who believed in the burgher construction, women’s economic activities did not threaten the patriarchal order in the home, in the markets, or in the city. One way of approaching the data and conclusions of this study is to say that Ghent was more exceptional than representative of women’s economic and legal status in medieval Europe. Women in Ghent had access to certain occupations, markets, and investment opportunities, but not to others, in a specific combination that was not exactly like any other locality. Ghent’s legal custom, government configuration, guild structures, and economic history were distinctly particular, not exactly like any other city in Flanders, let alone elsewhere in Europe. Comparison of women’s status among the particularist cities of the Low Countries is fraught with difficulty, and comparisons with rural areas, or with northern France and German territories, are even more problematic. The difficulty derives not merely from national historiographies, but also from the imprecision that results from conf lating individual local features while extracting common threads. Ghent’s special economic situation and legal customs are not merely superficial factors, but the root causes

9780230104952_09_con.indd 146

2/9/2011 12:38:19 PM

CONCLUSION

147

of women’s access to specific niches. Women derived their economic position from the inheritance and marital property customs that were specific to the city of Ghent.1 For example, adult women in Ghent could perform legal acts themselves, but women in nearby Antwerp had to work through a mambour, or guardian.2 In Paris, women did not work at the wool cloth draping as Ghent women did, but their silk weaving guilds offered women a middling-status occupation.3 In the fourteenth century, many Bruges women were broker/innkeepers and moneychangers, while there were relatively few women in these occupations in mid-fourteenthcentury Ghent.4 Generalizations across cities and regions run the risk of overlooking the particular customs and circumstances that created and supported the activity of women in each locality. I argue that the Ghent burgher construction was particular, but not exceptional. There are broad similarities in the economic position of women throughout the medieval Flemish, Netherlandish, German, and northern French cities, each of which had its own particular burgher construction. Evidence from other Flemish cities shows the casual acceptance of women in middling-status economic positions. Women were drapers in thirteenth-century Douai, fourteenth-century Bruges, and fifteenth-century Leiden, for example.5 The use of gender dyads in the city ordinances in thirteenth-century Douai indicates that women worked at many occupations, including dyeing, milling, moneychanging, and tanning.6 Surviving thirteenth- and fourteenth-century records from Douai include many women who are identified by their own names rather than by marital status and the names of male relatives.7 Onethird of the moneylenders in fourteenth-century Bruges were women.8 However, for most of the Low Countries, there is often little surviving evidence from before the fifteenth or even the sixteenth century, when women’s economic and legal roles were rapidly shrinking in Ghent and Douai.9 Sources like the acts in the Ghent aldermen’s registers offer priceless insight into actual practice in the fourteenth century for the entire Low Countries, not only for the occupations women could hold, but for issues of women’s legal capability, property management, marriage, and family systems. An acceptance of women’s economic activities similar to the burgher construction of mid-fourteenth-century Ghent probably existed throughout the Low Countries and in many cities of Germany and France before the fifteenth century, even though particular conditions carved out the scope of these activities in each urban or rural locality.10 Germany and northern France were governed by customary legal systems that bear a closer resemblance to customs of Ghent and other cities in the Low Countries than they do to the more centralized system

9780230104952_09_con.indd 147

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

148

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

of English common law.11 In continental Europe, there are numerous examples of women publicly performing legal acts, such as buying and selling property, loaning money, and bringing lawsuits, acting in their own names in contradiction to prescriptive sources.12 Often in connection with partible inheritance and Germanic marital property customs, these examples range across the traditional north-south division of medieval Europe to include Castile, Languedoc, and Genoa, as well as Paris, Cologne, and Rouen. The recent work edited by Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray, which breaches the traditional religious divisions in the Mediterranean world to examine women, property, and law in a wide range of locations, challenges the primacy of the much-studied Florentine paradigm in favor of a varied group of local inheritance and marital property practices, once thought to be held only in northwestern Europe, existing throughout southern Europe.13 Comparison of the particular cities of continental northwestern Europe might yield a similar result for the paradigm of northern pre-modern Europe. When earlier sources of actual practice do exist, this study suggests that it would be fruitful to analyze them in the context of their own time period, rather than in connection to later norms. Problematizing norms and analytical categories not only exposes assumptions but also leads to useful conclusions. Statistical comparison of the activities of men and women shows that wealth and social status were as important as gender in marking privilege. Barriers around the top echelons of the economy not only excluded women but also most men. Elite men may not have erected those barriers for the express purpose of excluding women, but to exclude competition in as many forms as possible.14 Clearly, men’s potential access to power within the guilds and city government gave them rights women would never have, but only a small wealthy and privileged elite of the male population in Ghent held political power and guild authority and profited from tax farms and longdistance trade. Before drawing conclusions about the patterns of women’s involvement in economic ventures, the patterns of men’s involvement must also be considered at the same level of detail. Another useful approach is analyzing the different forms clerks used to identify women, as well as comparing statistically the activities of widows, wives, single women, and those whose marital status is not given. In stark contrast to the pattern that prevailed in medieval England and the early modern Low Countries, most mid-fourteenth-century Ghent women who acted in their own names were not widows. Leaving aside the category of women whose marital status is not given, in the midfourteenth-century Ghent acts, women specifically identified as wives or daughters (the married and single categories) together outnumbered

9780230104952_09_con.indd 148

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

CONCLUSION

149

widows by a comfortable margin.15 Nor did single status doom women to poverty in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent. Instead, single women and those whose marital status is unknown had a similar distribution of wealth to widows and married women. Single women bought and sold houses, land, and annuities; loaned sizeable amounts of money; and worked at middling-status occupations, as well as the low-status occupations such as spinning to which they were later confined. It has also been useful to analyze the activities of married women who appeared with their husbands, rather than minimizing that performance as “consent” or privileging what women did for themselves over what they did for their husbands and households. I would like to encourage more explicit discussion of identification patterns in archival research.16 Although there are important particular differences in each city or rural locality, the results I have gained from problematizing identification patterns speak to the importance of this issue. In Ghent, the clerks identified 45 percent of women principals only by their own names and perhaps a title; for Douai, Ellen Kittell found that 60 percent of the women in her sample were not identified by marital status.17 Even if we never figure out whether these women were widows, single, or married, the fact that the clerks could omit their marital status means that marital status was not that important. The clerks, and the aldermen who authorized their actions, were not sufficiently concerned about verifying a woman’s legal capability and right to manage property on the basis of her marital status to put it in writing. Addressing the issue of identification patterns could show if this was a particularity of Flanders, or if it was more widespread. Useful conclusions may also result from conducting separate analyses of the earliest records (from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries) from the evidence dated after 1450. In Ghent, particular conditions in the fourteenth century gave way to a more standard gender construction in the sixteenth.18 Single women were the first women to be excluded from working at an occupation, while widows were allowed to carry on their husbands’ trade for the next generation, but not allowed to hire female workers. In male-headed craft production households, wives, and sometimes daughters and servant women, worked at crafts from which they would otherwise be barred. A woman’s wealth and right to work at an occupation derived from her husband’s status rather than her own efforts. Large disparities opened up between the wealth of widows and single women.19 A sixteenth-century Ghent woman’s economic life came to be determined by her marital status, as it was elsewhere in Europe.20 The trajectory of change over time in Ghent was from a more individual, or particular, gender construction to a more homogeneous one. Similar

9780230104952_09_con.indd 149

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

150

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

changes took place all over the southern Low Countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, despite important particular differences among the customs.21 Legal changes that restricted women, such as limiting the ability of women to act in civil cases, requiring male guardians to act for single and widowed women, or replacing parental authority with the sole authority of the father, were common throughout Western Europe in the early modern period.22 For other European cities and rural areas, it might be useful to analyze the more sparse evidence from before 1450 as evidence of a gender construction that was overwritten by a comparatively massive volume of sources, in both normative form and from actual practice, from after 1450. In one way, this study shows women’s economic activities were always constrained by patriarchal restrictions and liable to be taken over by men when they became noticeably profitable.23 However, it also shows that women themselves played a role in countering the impact of patriarchal constraints by continually seeking out and exploiting economic niches that were not closed to them. Because women had to work as well as wanted to work, they f lowed into the spaces around and between male preserves to exploit whatever economic opportunities were left. Some women pushed at the boundaries, which sometimes enlarged the field of opportunity and sometimes triggered a backlash. Just as men have relentlessly sought to bar women from certain preserves, women have relentlessly f lowed around those barriers, seeking new opportunities in changing conditions, pouring into male preserves suddenly left vacant by the vicissitudes of life, retreating when boundaries were redrawn by male authority.24 Even though many economic niches closed for women in the sixteenth century, some remained available or opened up for women anew.25 The constraints of patriarchy are only half of the story; women’s efforts, often with the cooperation of their husbands and families, tell the other half. Most medieval women did not make decisions based solely on their own self-interest. Instead, they often acted in the interests of their husbands, children, and extended families and did not openly challenge the dominant system itself. Although husbands and families had power to constrain women and certainly exercised that power in some cases, women also chose to act for the benefit of their families and households.26 One clue to this choice is that women picked and chose among family members rather than being passive onlookers to male orders. When Mergriete Scettorf ’s husband and brother-in-law ranged against her brother, she joined their effort. She later pledged her own property to support a joint investment with her husband. When she became a widow, male relatives might have urged the appointment of her son-in-law as supervising

9780230104952_09_con.indd 150

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

CONCLUSION

151

guardian (toesienre) for Mergriete’s minor son, but she chose to work with him as her surety. She was not equally dependent on male relatives, but chose to depend on some and to exclude others. No medieval woman could act or live without the interference of vrienden en magen, her relatives, family friends, neighbors, and networks of supporters. No medieval man could act without considering this group as well, even though contemporaries allowed him a wider scope of responsibilities and powers. If we privilege Mergriete’s acts undertaken alone as more “independent” than her acts taken with male relatives, we will miss the true continuity of her economic life. She was an economic partner of her first husband and worked together with selected male relatives to provide for her household and children through a period when her city was engulfed in war, rebellion, and economic recession. She was not a free agent, but she could choose to work with those male relatives who interpreted family interests in the same way that she did and to avoid those whom she regarded as wrong. Men had similar limitations and choices. Furthermore, her acts were essential for her family’s prosperity and survival. Although the tendency of women to act in the interests of the family may be widely applicable, this study also provides an economic background that may help explain the particularities of women’s activities in the Low Countries (and adjacent regions). Even though only two of the women in this study were specifically identified as beguines, the understanding of women’s economic capability characteristic of the burgher construction does much to explain the appeal and success of the beguine movement in the Low Countries. The beguine movement was built on the fact that the women could work publicly and support themselves outside of cloistered convents.27 The movement also depended on wealthier beguines being able to support poorer community members, which was made possible by the burgher construction’s tolerance for women’s economic activities. In thirteenth-century Paris, beguines from elite families supported themselves and other women by a combination of property ownership and productive work in cloth industries.28 In addition to claiming religious authority by their mysticism, apostolic lifestyle, and community work, some beguines pushed at the limits of the burgher construction by organizing self-supporting households of women, outside of male supervision, and perhaps outside of family control as well. But even after the Marguerite Porete conviction and clerical attempts to outlaw the beguine movement in the early 1300s, beguines survived in the Low Countries. Their families, urban elites, counts, countesses, and nobles endowed and supported beguinages and defended the rights of beguines to live in their own houses within court beguinages and work in the wider community.29 Women’s ownership and management of real

9780230104952_09_con.indd 151

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

152

WOM E N A N D E C ONOM IC AC T I V I T I E S

property, their access to middling-status occupations and investments, and acceptance of their economic activities by their families, male elites, local aldermen, and state officials helps to explain both the appeal and the success of the beguine movement in this region. Similarly, the role of Flemish and Burgundian noblewomen as patrons and owners of books of hours and other lay devotional works gains depth and clarity when considered against the economic background. Books of hours were produced in Bruges and other Flemish cities by Flemish artists, many of whom were women.30 Illustrations in the books of hours have been linked to Burgundian noble laywomen’s assertion of their own religious authority outside of both clerical and lay male control. 31 Although studies focus on the most elite of noblewomen, these duchesses were performing on a stage that was accustomed to women’s public performance in nonpolitical roles.32 Not only were women strongly associated with pious activity, but they possessed the wealth to purchase expensive objects, as well as a kind of confidence about public performance unavailable to women from cities that limited their legal capabilities. The links among high noblewomen as patrons, beguinages, urban convents, individual mystics, and workshops that produced books of hours and devotional paintings were also connections between nobles and burghers in urban space. They parallel the links of noblewomen such as Isabelle van Oestende and Lijsbette van Lierde to wealthy Ghent men and women for credit, investment, and assistance in lawsuits against noble kinsmen. The blurring of boundaries between social strata was accentuated in Ghent, Bruges, and other Flemish cities because of urban wealth and power, intermarriage, and intermingled social networks. The Flemish city was a site of expansive female performance on the religious, legal, and economic levels for women of noble and commoner status. The notion that wealthy families were primarily patrilineal structures that excluded women from property ownership does not apply at all in fourteenth-century Ghent, even among noble families. Even though fiefs in the Flemish countryside followed the pattern of primogeniture, noblewomen held considerable land and authority to manage property. Furthermore, noblewomen used the Ghent aldermen’s court to transact business with nobles, patricians, elites, and others of less illustrious status. The fourteenth-century Ghent evidence thus supports recent research showing that noblewomen owned property, held fiefs, and exercised public power in thirteenth-century France (including Flanders). 33 In Champagne, Blois, Chartres, and Occitania, women held fiefs and inherited property and titles from their natal families in addition to their dowries.34 The key factors giving them power were their noble birth and their natal families, some of whom allowed women a wide scope of

9780230104952_09_con.indd 152

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

CONCLUSION

153

activity at all stages of their lives. In social power relations and inheritance, the cognatic family continued to be important.35 Studies of actual practice in other cities across the north-south divide also show that many burgher parents gave their daughters real property rather than just movables.36 Along with other works, the Ghent example strongly suggests that a form of “power of women through the family” lasted into the midfourteenth century.37 Records of actual practice surviving from the northwestern European continent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries show many of the characteristics of the burgher construction—women managing property they own, publicly performing legal acts for the benefit of the family, buying, selling, loaning money, and making investments—in particular local forms. These records suggest the survival of the cognatic understanding of family, which placed ownership and responsibility for family property on every member, male and female, thus giving women a role in managing that property throughout changes in their marital status. The idea that women’s public performance of economic acts was beneficial to their families may well have predominated throughout the Low Countries, northern France, western Germany, and perhaps beyond before the early fifteenth century. The scraps of parchment and entries in dusty registers are the only voices we have left of burgher women, who did not challenge male dominance openly, but instead worked the system, along with men or alone, to provide for themselves and their families. It is in that way, rather than through the admonitions of male clerics, rhetoricians, and lawyers, that these women would have liked to be remembered.

9780230104952_09_con.indd 153

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

9780230104952_09_con.indd 154

2/9/2011 12:38:20 PM

NOTES

Introduction 1. City Archive of Ghent (Stadsarchief Gent, hereafter SAG), 301, 1, f. 30r, act no. 1, 16 Oct. 1349: “Kenlijc sij etc. dat Lievijn van Ansbeke commen es voer scepenen van der kuere in Ghend, der Symoene metten Scapen ende Her Janne den Pape, kende en verlijde dat soe [sic] sculdech es Kateline Minnemans tiene pond gro. torn. up hem selve ende up al tsine waer het gheleghen es binnen Ghend of der buten, die te gheldene ende te betaelne ten wille en vermaenne van de vors. Katelinen sonder enech langher respijt. Actum in scabinum Egidii Rijnvisch et eius sociorum XVI die octobre anno domini M CCC XLIX.” 2. David Nicholas, The Metamorphosis of a Medieval City: Ghent in the Age of the Arteveldes, 1302–1390 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 123. 3. SAG 301, 1, f. 155r-v, 25 Oct. 1357: “. . . ende elc over al up hemlieden ende up al thare . . .” 4. SAG 301, 1, f. 167v, act no. 3, 10 Dec. 1357: “Ende es de vors. her Jan Uten Berge bescaet vor den vors. Lievine van Ansbeke ende Kateline Minnemans als borghe vor hemlieden van der vors. sommen.” 5. Even discussions of partible inheritance and peasant families place emphasis on the sharing of the patrimony among brothers and the tendency of women to marry out and take property out of the patrimony. David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 136–8. 6. Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 82–3. 7. The custom of Ghent redacted in the sixteenth century is published in A. E. Gheldolf, A. Du Bois, and L. De Hondt, ed., Coutume de la ville de Gand, 2 vols., Coutumes des pays et comté du Flandre. Quartier de Gand, Commission royale pour la publication des anciennes lois et ordonnances de la Belgique (Brussels: G. Gobbaerts, 1868–1887) [hereafter: Coutume Gand]. 8. For partible inheritance and marital property customs, see Philippe Godding, Le Droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux du 12e au 18e siècle, Académie Royale de Belgique, Mémoires de la classe des lettres, Collection in -4°, -2° série, vol. 14 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1987), #585–93, pp. 333–6, #522–3, 527–9, pp. 296–300; E. M. Meijers, Het Ligurische Erfrecht in de Nederlanden, 3 vols. (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon,

9780230104952_10_not.indd 155

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

156

NOTES

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

1936); John Gilissen, “Le Statut de la femme dans l’ancien droit belge,” in Recueil de la société Jean Bodin, 12: La Femme, 2, ed. André Gouthier (Brussels: Editions de la librarie encyclopédique, 1962), pp. 254–62, 277–85, 306–18 [255–321]; Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 27–34, 197–211; James M. Murray, “Family, Marriage and Moneychanging in Medieval Bruges,” Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 115–25; Ellen E. Kittell, “Testaments of Two Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Wills of Medieval Genoa and Douai,” European Review of History 5.1 (1998): 47–82; Linda Guzzetti, “Women’s Inheritance and Testamentary Practices in Late Fourteenthand Early Fifteenth-Century Venice and Ghent,” in The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, ed. Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 79–108. David Nicholas has pointed out that Ghent patrician families never ceased calculating kinship ties bilaterally (cognatically, or on both sides). David Nicholas, The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 8. Ellen E. Kittell, “Guardianship over Women in Medieval Flanders: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Social History 31.4 (1998): 913–6 [896–930], and “The Construction of Women’s Social Identity in Medieval Douai: Evidence from Identifying Epithets,” Journal of Medieval History 25 (1999): 223 [215–27]. Marianne Danneel, Weduwen en wezen in het laat-middeleeuwse Gent, Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 3 (Leuven-Appeldoorn: Garant, 1995), pp. 370–84; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn., New Approaches to Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 116–7, 126–9; Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 72–96. See chapter six for further references. For the characterization of women’s legal economic activities before the aldermen as “public performance,” I am indebted to Ellen E. Kittell, “Women, Audience, and Public Acts in Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Women’s History 10.3 (1998): 76–7 [74–96]. Walter Prevenier, ed., Marriage and Social Mobility in the Late Middle Ages/ Mariage et Mobilité sociale au bas moyen âge: Handelingen van het colloquium gehouden te Gent op 18 april 1988, Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 274 (Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1992), pp. 2–3; Myriam Carlier and Tim Soens, ed., The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared: Proceedings of the International Conference Ghent 21st–22nd January 2000, Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries, no. 12 (LeuvenApeldoorn: Garant, 2001); Marc Boone, Thérèse De Hemptinne and Walter Prevenier, “Gender and Early Emancipation in the Low Countries

9780230104952_10_not.indd 156

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

NOTES

14. 15.

16. 17.

157

in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period,” in Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (Harlow and London: Pearson Education Limited, 2003), pp. 21–39; Eric Bousmar, “Du Marché aux bordiaulx: Hommes, femmes et rapports de sexe (gender) dans les villes des Pays-Bas au bas moyen âge: Etat de nos connaissances et perspectives de recherche,” in Hart en marge in de laat-middeleeuwse stedelijke maatschappij: Handelingen van het colloquium te Gent (22–23 augustus 1996)/Core and periphery in late medieval urban society: Proceedings of the colloquium at Ghent (22nd–23rd August 1996)/Coeur et marge dans la société urbaine au bas moyen âge: Actes du colloque tenu à Gand (22–23 août 1996), ed. Myriam Carlier, Anke Greve, Walter Prevenier, and Peter Stabel, Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 7 (Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1997), pp. 51–70; Myriam Carlier, “Paternity in Late Medieval Flanders,” and Marianne Danneel, “Gender and the Life Course in the Late Medieval Flemish Town,” in Secretum Scriptorum: Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier, ed. Wim Blockmans, Marc Boone and Thérèse de Hemptinne (Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1999), pp. 225–33, 235–58. Nicholas, Domestic Life, 70–106. Nicholas, Domestic Life, 83. He has also made the useful argument that the inheritance customs of Flanders played a prominent role in the rapid rise of the Flemish economy in the eleventh century. Flemish inheritance customs put considerable wealth into the hands of women, who could then carry it into a subsequent marriage, which promoted the circulation and liquidity of capital necessary for commercial development. David Nicholas, “Of Poverty and Primacy: Demand, Liquidity, and the Flemish Economic Miracle, 1050–1200,” American Historical Review 96.1 (1991): 17–41. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 255–61. For England, see among others: Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life-Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Caroline M. Barron, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London,” Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989): 35–58; Marjorie K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 5–44. For the northwest European demography, see J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1965), pp. 101–43. For Italy, see among others: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 212–39.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 157

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

158

NOTES

18. Marjorie K. McIntosh, “The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300–1630,” Journal of British Studies 44.3 (2005): 410–38. 19. Coutume Gand; Jos Monballyu, ed., Philips Wielant: Verzameld Werk (Brussels, Paleis der Academiën, 1995). 20. Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 36–7; Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, “Introduction: A New Economy of Power Relations: Female Agency in the Middle Ages,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 5 [1–16]. 21. For example, after discussing Howell’s arguments that patrilineal strategies triumphed “by the mid-sixteenth century,” Barbara Hanawalt noted, “The patterns that emerged in medieval London parallel those in Flanders,” which she followed by a discussion of laws limiting widows. Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Women and the Household Economy in the Preindustrial Period: An Assessment of Women, Work, and the Family,” Journal of Women’s History 11 (1999): 14 [10–16]. 22. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 915. 23. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 909. 24. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 267–8. 25. Nicholas, Domestic Life, p. 80. 26. Kittell, “Construction,” 215–27; Ellen E. Kittell and Kurt Queller, “‘Whether Man or Woman’: Gender Inclusivity in the Town Ordinances of Medieval Douai,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 63–100. 27. Kittell, “Construction,” 226. 28. Kittell, “Audience,” 74–96. 29. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 909. 30. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 915. 31. Ellen E. Kittell, “Women in the Administration of the Count of Flanders,” in Frau und Spätmittelalterlicher Alltag: Internationaler Kongress Krems an der Donau 2. Bis 5. Oktober 1984, Instituts für Mittelalterliche Realienkunde Österreichs, no. 9 (Vienna: Österreische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986), pp. 487–503. 32. Kimberly A. LoPrete and Theodore Evergates, “Introduction,” in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Theodore Evergates, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 1–5; and see below. 33. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 916. 34. For example, she conf lates management of “one’s own property” and “marital property,” an extremely important distinction in Ghent customary law. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 909. 35. Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” in Women and Work, pp. 167–97; among others. 36. Howell, Marriage Exchange, 120.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 158

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

NOTES

159

37. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle; Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters, pp. 37–41; Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Introduction,” in Women and Work, ix–x. 38. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, ed., Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 39. Maryanne Kowaleski, “Women’s Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century,” in Women and Work, pp. 145–64; Mate, Women in Medieval English Society, pp. 1–5, 33–57. 40. Judith M. Bennett, “The Village Ale-Wife: Women and Brewing in Fourteenth-Century England,” in Women and Work, pp. 20–36. 41. An exception is Kittell, who argues against structural limitations in the period before Burgundian rule. Kittell, “Construction,” 215, 224. For women’s work in the marketplace, see Peter Stabel, “Women at the Market. Gender and Retail in the Towns of Late Medieval Flanders,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 259–76; Claire Billen, “Le Marché urbain: Un Espace de liberté pour les femmes rurales?” in La Ville et les femmes en Belgique: Histoire et sociologie: Actes de la journée d’étude organisée le 12 février 1993 par les facultés universitaires Saint-Louis et le groupe interdisciplinaire d’études sur les femmes de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, ed. Éliane Gubin and Jean-Pierre Nandrin (Brussels: Publications des facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1993), pp. 41–56. For women’s work in a wide range of occupations, see Martha C. Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 70–94, 124–51; Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 73–5, 98–100; Myriam Greilsammer, L’Envers du tableau: Mariage et maternité en Flandre médiévale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990); Peter Stabel, “Guilds in Late Medieval Flanders: Myth and Reality of Guild Life in an Export-Oriented Environment,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 187–212; James M. Murray, Bruges: Cradle of Capitalism 1280–1390 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 300–29; Els Kloek, “Vrouwenarbeid aan banden gelegd? De arbeidsdeling naar sekse volgens de keurboeken van de oude draperie van Leiden, ca. 1380– 1580,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 13.4 (1987): 373–402; Jan Van Gerven, “Vrouwen, arbeid en sociale positie. Een voorlopig onderzoek naar de economische role en maatschappelijke positie van vrouwen in de Brabantse steden in de late Middeleeuwen,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 73 (1995): 947–66. 42. For France, see Sharon A. Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 136–43, and “Women and the Luxury Cloth Industries of Paris,” Piggott-McCone Endowed Lecture delivered at Seattle University, May 12, 2005; Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 43–4. For the Low Countries, see Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, pp. 70–94, 124–51; Kittell, “Testaments,” 67–82, and “Construction,” 215–27. For Germany, see Margret Wensky, “Women’s Guilds in Cologne in

9780230104952_10_not.indd 159

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

160

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

NOTES

the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 631–50. For Italy, see Mark Angelos, “Women in Genoese commenda contracts, 1155–1216,” Journal of Medieval History 20 (1994): 299–312. For the Mediterranean region, see Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray, Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800), Routledge Research in Gender and History, 11 (New York: Routledge, 2010). For Spain, see Teófilo F. Ruiz, “Women, Work and Daily Life in Late Medieval Castile,” and Mercedes Vaquero, “Women in the Chartularies of Toledo (1101–1291),” trans. Marilyn Stone, in Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, ed. Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 101–20, 121–46; and Marie Kelleher, The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 9–11. Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines of the Southern Low Countries, c. 1300—c. 1600 (Brussels: Institut Historique Belge de Rome-Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 1992), pp. 69–78, and other works; Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 85–7; Penelope Galloway, “ ‘Discreet and Devout Maidens’: Beguine Communities in Northern France, 1200–1500,” in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 94–6 [92–115], among others. Andrea Pearson, Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005); Dagmar Eichberger, ed., Women of Distinction: Margaret of York, Margaret of Austria (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); Jean C. Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages: Studies in Society and Visual Culture (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Alice Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). Many of the copyists themselves were women. Thérèse De Hemptinne, “Des Femmes copistes dans les PaysBas au bas moyen âge (14e-15e siècle). Approche d’une activité féminine mal connue,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 129–44. Erin L. Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Karen S. Nicholas, “Countesses as Rulers in Flanders,” in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Theodore Evergates, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 111–37. Kittell, “Construction,” 222–3, and “Audience,” 80–2. See also Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 8–12; Maryanne Kowaleski, “Single Women in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective,” and Sharon Farmer, “ ‘It Is Not Good That [Wo]man Should be Alone’: Elite

9780230104952_10_not.indd 160

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

NOTES

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

161

Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris,” in Singlewomen, 45–48 [38–82]; 82–3 [82–105]. See Cordelia Beattie, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Forster, Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History, 11 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 96–100; Herlihy, Medieval Households, 92–103. See also Jo Ann McNamara, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited,” in Gendering the Master Narrative, p. 22 [17–30]. Theodore Evergates, “Aristocratic Women in the County of Champagne,” in Aristocratic Women, pp. 74–110; Kathleen Nolan, ed., Capetian Women, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Amy Livingstone, “Noblewomen’s Control of Property in Early TwelfthCentury Blois-Chartres,” Medieval Prosopography 18 (1995): 55–72; Fredric L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours, Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Kittell, “Testaments,” 47–82. The importance of the dowry in circulating wealth between families and supporting growth of the urban economy in Italian cities has been the subject of many studies; Diane Owen Hughes, “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262–96; Stanley Chojnacki, “Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice,” in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan M. Stuard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 173–98; Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Isabelle Chabot, “La Loi du lignage: Notes sur le système successoral f lorentin,” Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 7 (1998): 51–72; Maristella Botticini, “A Loveless Economy? Intergenerational Altruism and the Marriage Market in a Tuscan Town, 1415–1436,” Journal of Economic History 59 (1999): 104–21; Guzzetti, “Women’s Inheritance” in Texture of Society, pp. 79–108; and “Dowries in Fourteenth-Century Venice,” Renaissance Studies 16 (2002): 430–73. Jaarregisters van de schepenen van de Keure, SAG, series 301, no. 1; partial registers for 1339, 1343–44, and 1345–46, and complete annual registers for 1349–50, 1353–54; 1357–58; 1360–61. The aldermen began their annual terms on August 15, and every annual register thus runs from August 15 of the first year to August 14 of the second year. J. Boon prepared a useful inventory of the 1339–1358 surviving acts: Regesten op de jaarregisters van de schepenen van de keure te Gent, 2 vols. (Ghent-Leuven: Belgisch centrum voor landelijke geschiedenis, no. 8, 1968) and Johan Vannieuwenhuyse recorded the 1360–61 acts in Regesten op de Jaarregisters van de keure: Schepenjaar 1360–1361 (Ghent: Stad Gent, 1981). See chapter one for details. The annual registers of the aldermen of the Gedele are preserved in the SAG, series 330, in a nearly complete series beginning in 1349. SAG, series

9780230104952_10_not.indd 161

2/9/2011 12:36:51 PM

162

NOTES

400, contains the surviving city accounts, also published in Napoléon De Pauw and Julius Vuylsteke, eds., De Rekeningen der Stad Gent. Tijdvak van Jacob van Artevelde 1339–1349, 3 vols. Maatschappij van Nederlandsche letterkunde en geschiedenis (Ghent: Ad. Hoste, 1874–1885); and Alfons Van Werveke, ed. Gentse Stads- en Baljuwsrekeningen (1351–1364) (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1970), for the period of this study. Ordinances promulgated by the aldermen are published in Napoléon De Pauw, ed., De Voorgeboden der Stad Gent in de XIVe eeuw (1337–1382) (Ghent: C. Annoot-Braeckman, Ad. Hoste, 1885). There are very few guild records surviving, but some of those that do remain date to the fourteenth century, at SAG, series 156. 55. Howell, Marriage Exchange, p. 14.

1 The Urban Context 1. Untitled Miniature of a Fight in Ghent, Chroniques des comtes de Flandre, Ghent, 1477, Wells-next-the-Sea (Norfolk), Holkham Ms. 659F, f. 226. Used by permission. 2. See for example: Jean Froissart, Chroniques (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1869–1975), vol. 1, ch. 59, vol. 10, ch. 228–97; Napoléon de Pauw, ed. Cartulaire historique et génélogique des Artevelde (Brussels: Hayez, 1920), pp. 355–88, among many others. See also David Nicholas, The Van Arteveldes of Ghent: The Varieties of Vendetta and the Hero in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. xiii–xiv. 3. I mean political in the narrow sense of holding positions of power in the city government and city corporations, such as guilds. Kittell defines “political” life as including public activity, but that definition seems too broad to be useful. Kittell, “Audience,” 77. 4. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, pp. 7–14; and Barron, “Golden Age,” 47–49; Sandy Bardsley, “Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England,” Past and Present 165 (1999): 3–29. 5. Erik Thoen and Isabelle Devos, “Pest in de zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de middeleeuwen en de moderne tijden: Een status quaestionis over de ziekte in haar sociaal-economische context,” in De Pest in de Nederlanden: Medisch historische beschouwingen 650 jaar na de zwarte dood/La Peste aux Pay-bas: Considérations Médico-Historiques 650 ans après la peste noire, ed. Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van België, Academia Regia Belgica Medicinae-Dissertationes-Series Historica, no. 7 (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1998), pp. 19–43; W. P. Blockmans, “The Social and Economic Effects of Plague in the Low Countries: 1349–1500,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 58 (1980): 833–63. 6. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 24–26; Walter Prevenier, “La Démographie des villes du comté de Flandre aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Etat de la question. Essai d’interprétation,” Revue du Nord 65, no. 257 (1983): 255–75.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 162

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

NOTES

163

7. The first complete annual register of the aldermen of the Keure covers the year 1349–50, SAG, series 301, no. 1; the oldest surviving annual register of the aldermen of the Gedele is dated 1349–50, SAG, series 330, no. 11. 8. Historians estimate that the population of Ghent was between 55,000 and 64,000 in 1356 through 1358; Walter Prevenier and Marc Boone, “The ‘City-State’ Dream: 1300–1500,” in Ghent: In Defence of a Rebellious City: History, Art, Culture, ed. Johan Decavele (Antwerp: MercatorFonds, 1989), p. 81 [81–105]; W. P. Blockmans, G. Pieters, W. Prevenier, and R. W. M. van Schaik, “Tussen crisis en welvaart: Sociale veranderingen 1300–1500,” in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 12 vols. (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1980–1982), 4:43–56 [42–86]. [Hereafter AGN.] Paris had approximately 200,000 people, according to Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (New York: Viking, 2004), 33. Estimates of the London population in the early fourteenth century range from 60,000 to 100,000. Francis Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 92. 9. H. P. H. Jansen, “Handel en nijverheid 1000–1300,” in AGN, 2: 148–76. 10. Jansen, “Handel,” in AGN, 2:148–76; Hans Van Werveke, “Introduction historique,” in Guy De Poerck, La Draperie médiévale en Flandre et en Artois: Technique et terminologie, 3 vols., Rijksuniversiteit te Gent werken uitgegeven door de faculteit van de wijsbegeerte en letteren, 110–112 (Bruges: De Tempel, 1951), 1:7–25. 11. J. A. Van Houtte and R. Van Uytven, “Nijverheid en handel 1300–1500,” in AGN, 4:87–111; Patrick Chorley, “The Cloth Exports of Flanders and Northern France During the Thirteenth Century: A Luxury Trade?” Economic History Review 40 (1987): 349–79; Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier, eds., La Draperie ancienne des Pays-Bas: Débouchés et stratégies de survie (14e-16e siècles) Actes du colloque tenu à Gand le 28 avril 1992/ Drapery Production in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Markets and Strategies for Survival (14th-16th Centuries): Proceedings of the Colloquium Ghent, April 28th 1992, Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries (Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1993); John Munro, “Urban Regulations and Monopolistic Competition in the Textile Industries of the Late-Medieval Low Countries,” in Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History. Proceedings of the Tenth International Economic History Congress: Session B-15, ed. Erik Aerts and John H. Munro (Louvain: Louvain History Press, 1990), pp. 41–52, and “The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles: Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1270–1570,” Journal of Early Modern History 3.1 (Feb. 1999): 1–74, as well as many other works. See also chapter 5. 12. Walter Endrei, “Manufacturing a Piece of Woollen Cloth in Medieval Flanders: How Many Work Hours?” in Textiles, pp. 14–23. 13. Peter Stabel, “Marketing Cloth in the Low Countries: Manufacturers, Brokers and Merchants (14th-16th centuries),” International Trade in the Low Countries (14th-16th Centuries): Merchants, Organisation, Infrastructure:

9780230104952_10_not.indd 163

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

164

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

NOTES

Proceedings of the International Conference Ghent-Antwerp, 12th-13th January 1997, ed. Peter Stabel, Bruno Blondé and Anke Greve, Studies in Urban Social, Economic, and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 10 (Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2000), pp. 16, 24 [15–36]; Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, pp. 62–71; Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 73–75, 77–78. See also chapter 5. Munro, “Symbiosis,” 35–36. G. De Poerck, Draperie médiévale, 1:60–65. Herman Van der Wee, “Structural Changes and Specialization in the Industry of the Southern Netherlands, 1100–1600,” Economic History Review 28 (1975): 203–21; Chorley, “Cloth Exports,” 349–79; Munro, “Urban Regulations,” in Textiles, pp. 41–52; Marc Boone, “L’Industrie textile à Gand au bas moyen âge ou les resurrections successives d’une activité réputée moribonde,” in La Draperie ancienne, pp. 15–62; Marc Boone, “Les Métiers dans les villes f lamandes au bas moyen âge (XIVe–XVIe siècles): Images normatives, réalités socio-politiques et économiques,” in Les Métiers au moyen âge: Aspects économiques et sociaux: Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve 7–9 octobre 1993, ed. Pascale Lambrechts and Jean-Pierre Sosson, Publications de l’Institut d’études médiévales, 2nd series, no. 15 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1994), pp. 1–21; Stabel, “Marketing,” in International Trade, pp. 15–36. Van Houtte and Van Uytven, “Nijverheid,” in AGN, 4:87–111; David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 274–76. M. Vandermaesen, “Vlaanderen en Henegouwen onder het huis van Dampierre 1244–1384,” in AGN, 2:399–440. Van Houtte and Van Uytven, “Nijverheid,” in AGN, 2:98–99; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 154–56; Marc Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen ca. 1384-ca. 1453. Een sociaal-politieke studie van een staatsvormingproces, Verhandelingen van de koninklijke academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunsten van België, no. 133 (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1990), pp. 45–47. Boone, “Métiers,” in Les Métiers, pp. 6–15. Stabel, “Women at the Market,” in Secretum Scriptorum, p. 275; Danneel, Weduwen, 356–59. Boone, Gent, pp. 243–44; Stabel, “Guilds,”187–212. Jean-Pierre Sosson, “Les Métiers, normes et réalité. L’exemple des anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” in Le Travail au moyen âge. Une approache interdisciplinaire, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and Collette Muraille-Samaran (Louvain-la-Neuve: Publications de l’Institut d’études médiévales, 1990), pp. 339–48; Stabel, “Guilds,”187–212. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 143–48. Boone, Gent p. 58. Van Houtte and Van Uytven, “Nijverheid,” in AGN, 4:87–111; Blockmans, Pieters, Prevenier and Van Schaik, “Tussen crisis,” in AGN 4:42–86.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 164

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

NOTES

165

27. Hans Van Werveke, De Gentsche stadsfinanciën in de middeleeuwen, Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Mémoires, collection in 8º, deuxième série, 34 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1934), pp. 112–59; F. and W. P. Blockmans, “Devaluation, Coinage and Seignorage under Louis de Nevers and Louis de Male, Counts of Flanders, 1330–84,” in Coinage in the Low Countries (880–1500): The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, ed. N. J. Mayhew, BAR International Series 54 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1979), pp. 69–94. 28. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 250, 291–2; Martha C. Howell and Marc Boone, “Becoming Early Modern in the Late Medieval Low Countries,” Urban History 23, pt. 3 (1996): 321 [300–324]. 29. Raf Verbruggen, Geweld in Vlaanderen: Macht en onderdrukking in de Vlaamse steden tijdens de veertiende eeuw, Vlaamsche Historische Studies, Genootschap voor Geschiedenis “Société d’Emulation” te Brugge, no. 12 (Bruges: Marc Van de Wiele, 2005), pp. 29–30, 51–77. 30. Vandermaesen, “Vlaanderen,” in AGN, 2:414–41; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 27–29. 31. Nicholas, Arteveldes, pp. 9, 188–98; and “Crime and Punishment in Fourteenth-Century Ghent (second part),” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 48.4 (1970), 1153–56 [1141–76]; reprinted in Trade, Urbanisation and the Family: Studies in the History of Medieval Flanders (Aldershot, G.B.: Variorum, 1996), chapter 6; Willem Blockmans, Een middeleeuwse vendetta: Gent 1300 (Houten, Neth.: De Haan, 1987). 32. Marc Boone and M. Prak, “Rulers, Patricians, and Burghers: The Great and the Little Traditions of Urban Revolt in the Low Countries,” in A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, ed. K. Davids and J. Lucassen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 99–134. 33. Verbruggen, Geweld, p. 18. 34. Anonymous chronicler edited in De Pauw, Cartulaire, p. 246, quoted in Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, p. 222. 35. Boone and Prak, “Rulers,” in Miracle, pp. 100–1; Verbruggen, Geweld, pp. 51–66. 36. Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Medieval History 31.4 (2005): 369–93; Verbruggen, Geweld, pp. 168–69. 37. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, p. 157. 38. Boone, Gent, pp. 171–77. 39. Verbruggen, Geweld, pp. 56–57. 40. Vandermaesen, “Vlaanderen,” in AGN: 2:429–32. 41. Nicholas, Arteveldes, pp. 19–39. 42. Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 299–369; Verbruggen, Geweld, pp. 56–57. 43. The old count, Louis of Nevers, died in the Battle of Crécy in 1346. Vandermaesen, “Vlaanderen,” in AGN, 2:429–432.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 165

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

166

NOTES

44. Boone, Gent, pp. 14–47. 45. Count Louis of Male had one surviving heir, his daughter Margaret of Male, who married Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. The Burgundian dukes ruled over Flanders after 1384. 46. Some women did participate in street violence. Ellen E. Kittell, “Flemish Female Misdeeds: A Speculation,” in Female Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Karen Glente and Lise Winther-Jensen (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1989), pp. 105–28. 47. Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 265–69; Van Werveke, Gentsche stadsfinanciën, p. 34. 48. Johan Decavele, “Bestuursinstellingen van de stad Gent (einde 11de eeuw—1795),” in De gewestelijke en lokale overheidsinstellingen in Vlaanderen tot 1795, ed. Walter Prevenier and Beatrijs Augustyn, Algemeen Rijksarchief en Rijksarchief in de Provinciën, Studia 72 (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 1997), pp. 277–321. 49. Civil disputes, private contracts and other agreements between persons fell into the category of “non-contentious jurisdiction” (vrijwillige rechtspraak, juridiction gracieuse.) James M. Murray, Notarial Instruments in Flanders between 1280 and 1452 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1995), p. 22; Decavele, “Bestuursinstellingen,” in Overheidsinstellingen, p. 289. 50. For further detail, see Nicholas, “Crime,” 1141–46. 51. Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 28–30; Decavele, “Bestuursinstellingen,” in Overheidsinstellingen, pp. 283–94. 52. Decavele, “Bestuursinstellingen,” in Overheidsinstellingen, pp. 286–87. 53. David Nicholas, Town and Countryside: Social, Economic and Political Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders (Bruges: De Tempel, 1971), pp. 60–61. 54. Nicholas, Town, pp. 148–9; Boone, Gent, pp. 181–82. 55. Nicholas, Town, p. 71. 56. SAG, series 301, no. 1. Since the aldermen’s terms began on August 15, each register ran from August 15 to August 14 of the following year. A. Nevejans, “Aldus staet in scepenen bouc . . . De Registers van de Gentse schepenen van de keure in de 14de eeuw,” Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent 56 (2002): 53–64. 57. Notaries were just beginning to operate in Flanders in the fourteenth century, and were not yet common. The aldermen employed clerks, who used customary phrases and forms in the vernacular (Middle Dutch). Murray, Notarial Instruments, pp. 14, 82; Kittell, “Testaments,” pp. 51–52. 58. Marc Boone, “Openbare diensten en initiatieven te Gent tijdens de late Middeleeuwen (14de-15de eeuw),” in Het Openbaar initiatief van de gemeenten in België: Historische grondslagen (Ancien Régime): 11de Internationaal Colloquium, Spa, 1–4 Sept. 1982: Handelingen/L’Initiative publique des communes en Belgique: Fondements historiques (Ancient Régime): Actes Colloque international, Spa, 1–4 Sept. 1982, Pro Civitate, no. 65 (Brussels, Crédit communal de Belgique, 1984), pp. 74–114. 59. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 282, 296; Murray, Notarial Instruments, pp. 94–95; R. C. van Caenegem, Geschiedenis van het strafprocesrecht in Vlaanderen van

9780230104952_10_not.indd 166

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

NOTES

60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

167

de XIe tot de XIVe eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1956), pp. 87–88, and Kittell, “Audience,” 76–77. Boone, Gent, pp. 124–25. Decavele, “Bestuursinstellingen,” in Overheidsinstellingen, pp. 298–99, 304–5. SAG, series 400. Godding, Le Droit privé, 163–4; Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe: 1270–1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 282–94; Jan Dumolyn, “De Vlaamse adel in de Late Middeleeuwen: staatsdienst en sociale mobiliteit,” in Les Elites nobiliaires dans les Pays-Bas au seuil des temps modernes, Centre de recherches en historie du droit et des institutions, cahier 16 (Brussels: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2001), pp. 10–14 [9–30]. Jan Dumolyn, “Nobles, Patricians and Officers: The Making of a Regional Political Elite in Late Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Social History 40 (2006), 431–52; Paul De Win, “The Lesser Nobility of the Burgundian Netherlands,” in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Michael Jones (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), pp. 105–6 [95–118]. These studies focus on the fifteenth century, and should be balanced by consulting E. Warlop, The Flemish Nobility Before 1300, trans. J. B. Ross and H. Vandermoere (Courtrai: G. Desmet-Huysman, 1975), particularly pp. 275–98. Nicholas, Town, pp. 55–56. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, pp. 254–55; Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 40–42. The original right of citizenship in Ghent was granted to those who possessed land (erven) within the city. By the fourteenth century, these plots of city land changed hands regularly. Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 165; Boone, Gent, p. 122. F. Blockmans, Het Gentsche stadspatriciaat tot omstreeks 1302, Rijksuniversiteit te Gent werken uitgegeven door de faculteit van de wijsbegeerte en letteren, 85 (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1938), pp. 52–55, 320–24; and Hans Van Werveke, Gent: Schets van een Sociale Geschiedenis (Ghent: Boekhandel Rombaut-Fecheyr, 1947), pp. 27–33. Boone, Gent, pp. 36, 39–40, 122, 159. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 8, 76, 141. Howell and Boone, “Becoming Early Modern,” in Gender, Power and Privilege, pp. 302–3. Boone, Gent, pp. 23–120. Dumolyn and Haemers, “Patterns,” 369–93. Blockmans, “Tussen crisis,” in AGN, 4:52–53, 63–64, 74–78; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 55, 126–30, 224–35. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 55–57. Myriam Carlier, “Solidariteit of sociale controle? De rol van vrienden en magen en buren in een middeleeuwse stad,” in Hart en marge, pp. 71–91.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 167

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

168 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

91. 92.

93.

NOTES

Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, p. 345. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, p. 42. Boone, Gent, pp. 139–40; Danneel, Weduwen, p. 290. For a different viewpoint, see Kittell, “Audience,” 75, 85–86. Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 77. Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 79. Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 78; Kittell, “Audience,” 80; Van Caenegem, Strafprocesrecht, p. 202. Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 79, 120–21. Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 291. Danneel, “Gender,” in Secretum Scriptorum, p. 226. Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 266, 273; Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 256, 263. Pablo Fernandez, “Het verschijnsel kindermoord in de Nederlanden (XIVde-XVde eeuw),” in Sociale structuren en topografie van armoede en rijkdom in de 14de en 15de eeuw. Methodologische aspecten en resultaten van recent onderzoek. Handelingen van het colloquium gehouden te Gent op 24 mei 1985, ed. W. Prevenier, R. Van Uytven, and E. van Cauwenberghe (Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1986), pp. 111–33; Myriam Carlier, Kinderen van de minne? Bastaarden in het vijftiende-eeuw Vlaanderen, Verhandelingen van de koninklijke vlaamse academie van België van wetenschappen en kunsten (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 2001); and conversation with author, Ghent, 10 Nov. 2003. De Hemptinne, “Des Femmes copistes,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 133–4; Hilde De Ridder-Symoens, “Stad en kennis,” in Hart en marge, pp. 133–34 [131–52]; Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 84, 123–4. Walter Prevenier, “Violence against Women in Fifteenth-Century France and the Burgundian State,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, Medieval Cultures, vol. 16 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 186–203. Danneel, “Gender and Life Course,” in Secretum Scriptorum, p. 229; Boone, De Hemptinne and Prevenier, “Gender and Early Emancipation,” in Gender, Power and Privilege, pp. 24–25. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns,” pp. 101–43. Katrien Heene, “Vrouwen en mobiliteit in de Nederlanden: Een verkenning in Mediolatijnse teksten,” Queeste: Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde 9 (2002): 19–35; Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 2–5 and 96–99; Pierre J. Payer, “Confession and the Study of Sex in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. 3–31; Michael Haren, “Confession, Social Ethics and Social Discipline in the Memoriale presbiterorum,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), pp. 109–22 and 156–63. Jan van Boendale (De Clerc), De Brabantsche Yeesten, of Rymkronyk van Braband van Jan de Klerk, van Antwerpen, ed. J. F. Willems, Académie

9780230104952_10_not.indd 168

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

NOTES

94.

95.

96.

97. 98. 99.

169

royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, Commission royale d’histoire, Publications in-quarto, Collection de chroniques belges inédites (Brussel, M. Hayez, 1839–69), book 6, vol. 2: 14–5, 17; Andries De Smet and Antonis De Roovere, Excellente Chronike van Vlaenderen, in “Un Texte inédit de la Chronique de Flandre concernant Artevelde,” Bulletin de la commission royale d’histoire 82 (1913): 337 [323–67]. For the view that these attitudes did not predominate in Flanders before the fifteenth century, see Ellen E. Kittell, “Reconciliation or Punishment: Women, Community, and Malefaction in the Medieval County of Flanders,” in Texture of Society, ed. Kittell and Suydam, pp. 18–19 [3–30]. Marc Boone, Machteld Dumon, and Birgit Reusens, Immobiliënmarkt, fiscaliteit en sociale ongelijkheid te Gent, 1483–1503, Standen en Landen, vol. 78 (Kortrijk-Heule: U.G.A., 1981), pp. 230–32. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 362. For Douai, see Kittell, “Testaments,” 74–80, and for a general overview, see Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, “A Singular Past,” in Singlewomen, pp. 1–37. Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 1–86; Ziegler, Sculpture, pp. 69–78; among other works. Simons, Cities of Ladies, p. 51. Boone, Gent, p. 155.

2 Activity and Continuity: Patterns of Women’s Economic Participation 1. SAG 301, 1, f. 55v, act no. 3, 19 Mar. 1350: [“. . . welke maecte machtech ende stelde in sijne stede Joncvrouw Beatrisen Blanckaerds . . . “] Ghiselbrecht might have owed Beatrise money, and assigned her the debt from Jan Braem to repay her. Cf. Nicholas, Domestic Life, p. 42, and Kittell, “Guardianship,” p. 912. Some of the material of this chapter appears in an earlier form in Shennan Hutton, “ ‘On Her and All Her Property’: Women’s Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent,” Continuity and Change 20, no. 3 (2005): 325–49; and “Competing Conceptualizations of Women’s Economic Activities in Fourteenth-Century Ghent,” Handelingen der maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent n.s. 56 (2005): 43–70. 2. SAG 330, 1, f. 11v, act no. 1, 18 Dec. 1349. 3. SAG 301, 1, f. 56r, act no. 4, 24 Mar. 1350. 4. There is a Beatrise Blankards in the State Archives of Ghent, Bisdom St. Baafsabdij, K 1436, f. 36v. This may or may not be the same woman. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for this citation. 5. The high incidence of women being legally identified only by their own names and not by relationship to a male relative or by marital status has been noted in Douai. Kittell, “Construction,” 215–27. For joncvrouw, cf. Kittell, “Audience,” p. 93, n49. 6. Although most women in Italian notarial registers, church cartularies, and English court records appear to be identified by their marital status and

9780230104952_10_not.indd 169

2/9/2011 12:36:52 PM

170

NOTES

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

the name of their husband, father, or brother, women were sometimes identified only by their own names in these sources. This is an area that I believe could benefit from research for comparative purposes. See Beattie, Medieval Single Women, pp. 32–3 and Kittell, “Testaments,” p. 59. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 376–7. E. M. Meijers, Het Oost-Vlaamsche erfrecht, vol. 3 of Het Ligurische erfrecht in de Nederlanden (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1936); Godding, Le Droit privé, #479, p. 269; Dirk Heirbaut, “Weduwen, erfgenamen en lenen: De evolutie van het feodale erf- en huwelijksvermogensrecht in Vlaanderen (1000–1300),” Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis 1 (1998): 7–26. Godding, Le Droit privé, #61, p. 78; Gilissen, “Statut,” in La Femme, pp. 282–4; Philippe Godding, “La Famille dans le droit urbain de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest au bas moyen-âge,” Household, p. 27 [25–36]. Coutume Homologuée, in Coutume Gand, 1:2–167; Monballyu, Wielant. For an example, see Gilissen’s discussion of married women’s legal capacity, using sources from sixteenth-century Ypres, fourteenth-century Vilvoorde, and seventeenth-century Brussels, to conclude that married women were legally incapable (in Ghent and elsewhere.) Gilissen, “Statut,” in La Femme, p. 295. Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 36–7; Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 209–11; Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” pp. 80–6. John Gilissen, La Coutume, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, fasc. 41 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), pp. 24–7. Godding, Le Droit privé, #585, p. 333, #229, p. 162. Godding, Le Droit privé, #516–7, pp. 292–3, #552, pp. 311–2; Daneel, Weduwen, pp. 254–6, 271–2. Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, nos. 19 and 20, p. 92; Godding, Le Droit privé, #519–20, pp. 295–6 and #537–42, pp. 304–6; Danneel, Weduwen, p. 263. This is a significant difference from both Douai, where a widow could f lee her late husband’s estate (but only if the couple had a marriage contract that gave them that right), and Bruges, where creditors were paid only after the widow was given her portion of the community property. Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 29–36; Murray, “Family,” 115–25. Martha C. Howell, “The Properties of Marriage in Late Medieval Europe: Commercial Wealth and the Creation of Modern Marriage,” in Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller, and Sarah Rees Jones, International Medieval Research, vol. 11 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 17–61; Godding, Le Droit privé, #486, pp. 273–4. Godding, Le Droit privé, #48–60, pp. 72–8, #546, pp. 307–8. Godding, Le Droit privé, #45–6, pp. 70–71. Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, no. 2, p. 86: [“Ghehuwede vrauwen zyn in de macht van huerlieder mans, in zulcker wys dat se gheen contracten, kennessen of verbanden tusschen levende en vermoghen te makene niet meer voor wette dan anders, buuten den wetene ende consente van huere mans. . . .”]

9780230104952_10_not.indd 170

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

NOTES

171

20. Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, nos. 1, 5 and 6, p. 86–8. 21. Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, no. 11, p. 88. 22. Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, no. 2 and 10, p. 86–88; Godding, Le Droit privé, #511, p. 289. 23. Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, no. 19, p. -92; The custom states that husbands and wives are personally obligated for the movable debts coming from each other’s side of the family. 24. Godding, Le Droit privé, #64–5, pp. 79–80. 25. Coutume Gand, Cahier Primitif, rubric V, no. 18 and 19, p. 250. 26. Cahier Primitif, rubric V, no. 20, p. 250. 27. As seen in SAG 301, 1, f. 223v, act no. 3, 5 Dec. 1360. See also chapter four. 28. Godding, Le Droit privé, #65, p. 80; Murray, Notarial Instruments, p. 97. 29. Boone, Gent, p. 27. 30. The terms “openbare coopwijf ” or “marchande publique” do appear in fourteenth-century documents from other cities in the southern Low Countries, such as Tournai, Liège and Brussels. Gilissen, “Statut,” in La Femme, p. 296. 31. SAG 301, 1, f. 174v, act no. 3, 10 Feb. 1358: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat van al den ghedinghe dat was tusschen Joesse den Vos in deene zijde ende Katelinen Heinrix wijf van Oesterzele an dander zijde, so wijsden scepenen van der kuere in Ghend, der Lievin Damman ende sinen ghezellen, na tale ende na wedertale ende naer al dats vore hem commen es alse van den drien ponden gro. tor. die Katelinen ware ghewijst te ghevene Joesse vors., dat Joes dar af voeren af sal slaen een pond gro. tor. in minderinghen van den drien ponden gro. tor. over de cateile die hij hadde van Katelinen vors. Ende vort zo wijsden schepenen alse van deser sake deen den andren nemmermeer niet te eesschene. Vort zo kend hem Joes vergolden van Catelinen vors. van twee ponden gro. tor. alse van desen ghedinghe. . . .”] 32. For the possibility that she was really a widow, see below, and Hutton, “On Herself,” 337–8. 33. There are a few acts with married women that include a statement of the husband’s consent to her actions, such as SAG 301, 1, f. 240r, act no. 1, 6 Mar. 1361. 34. SAG 301, 26, section 1, f. 12r, act no. 5, 6 Sep. 1420; f. 13r, act no. 17, 11 Oct. 1420; 13v, act no. 12, 23 Oct. 1420, and many others. 35. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 378–9. 36. Martha C. Howell, “From Land to Love: Commerce and Marriage in Northern Europe during the Late Middle Ages,” Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis 10 (2007): 239 [216–53]. 37. Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 15–9. 38. SAG 301, 1, f. 53r, act no. 4, 16 March 1350: [“Kenlijc si etc. dat Diederic uten Rosen ende Joncfr. Kateline siin wettelike wijf quamen voer schepenen van der kuere in de stede van Ghend, her Gillis Riinvissch, her Janne Hyoens sone, Gillis den Corten, Janne den Pape, Symoene metten Scappen, ende andren haren ghesellen kenden ende verlijden dat si

9780230104952_10_not.indd 171

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

172

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

NOTES

hadden vercocht Joncfr. Alisen van Coleghem ende Joncfr. Mergriete haerre suster IX lb. ende IIII s. par. tsairs erveliken rente, die si hadden up derve daer Joncfr. Juete Speciers in woent up de Hoghepoert, IIII lb. par. tsiars, ende up derve daer meester Gillis de Wapensmedere up woent, VIII lib. par. tsiars, ende up derve daer Macharijs Witmans wedue ende harre kindere huus up staet. . . .”] See Kittell, “Construction,” 217–22. See this also for Ypres. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 905. Cf. Nicholas, Domestic Life, p. 72. Nicholas counts the number of acts with women through 1390, but does not analyze the marital status of women in the acts. SAG 301, 1, f. 126r, act no. 3, 24 Mar. 1354: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat commen siin vor scepenen van der kuere in Ghend, Gherem Borluute ende Janne van Lede, Jan ser Maecheleins ende Joncvr. Celie siin wettelike wijf, de welke kende ende verlijeden dat zij hadden vercocht wel ende redenlijc Pietren uten Wissele half thuus ende half therve dat men eedt Tielroden . . . ende dit al omme eene zeker somme van ghelde van der welker hem Jan ende Joncvr. Celie vors. kenden betaelt ende ghenouch ghedaen van Pietren vors. . . .”] SAG 301, 1, f. 22r, act no. 1, 4 Mar. 1346: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat commen ziin in propren persoene Lievin Acharis ende Lijsbette ziin wijf vor scepenen van der Keure . . . de welke hebben verkent ende verlijt dat zij sculdech ziin goeder rederliker scult den her Gherrarde Leewarde viere ende viertech guldenie ende eenen alven. De welke somme zij gheloofden te betaelne also zij zelve seiden te II terminen. . . .”] Kittell, “Guardianship,” 904, 917. Five expressions were used to describe temporary representation—“in the name of ” [in den name van], “represents in this case” [vervaet in deze zake], or “represents” [vervaet] alone, “on behalf of ” [over], and “for the benefit of ” [te bouf ]. Cf. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 902. SAG 301, 1, f. 148r, act no. 1, 17 Aug. 1357: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat commen siin vor scepenen . . . Joncvr. Cateline Houdewinds over hare selven ende Janne Staveliin dien zoe vervaen heeft in dese zake, Jan van Libersa over hem ende over Lisbetten Ghiseliins die hij vervaen heeft in dese sake, de welke kenden ende verlijeden dat zij betaelt ende vergolden waren van Willemme den Quinquere van tienen ponden gro. torn. VIII gro. min, de welke hij hemlieden gheloofde . . . .”] SAG 301, 1, f. 58v, act no. 2, 5 Mar. 1350: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat Jacob Trijl heift ghecocht ende ghecreghen wel ende wettelike jeghen Janne Trijle sinen broeder ende jeghen Joncvr. Lijsbetten sinen wettelike wive dat land dat hier naer bescreven staet licghende in dinsen stede parcheelen in de prochie van Heinen. . . . . Ende joncvr. Lijsbette vors. heift quite ghescolden bi consente van Janne Trijle haren wettelike man ende vocht, alle de bilevinghe ende recht dat so namaels hebben mochte an dit vors. land.”] Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 292.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 172

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

NOTES

173

49. The above case involved rural land, probably held in feudal tenure. See Kittell, “Guardianship,” 899, and the discussion of fief-holding below and in chapter six. Not only were the inheritance rules for fief-holding different, but the case could be taken to comital feudal courts, as well as city courts. 50. SAG 301, 1, f. 1v-2r, 6 June 1339; f. 3v, act no. 1, 5 June 1339; f. 87r, act no. 1, 4 Aug. 1350; f. 118v, act no. 1, 24 Jan. 1354. 51. SAG 301, 1, f. 31v, act no. 2, undated, in 1349–50 register: [“. . . Claise Alverdoe in den name ende alse vogt van mirer vrouwen Agneesen van Brakele vrauwe van Sonnemare sinen wetteliken wive . . .”] 52. While ius proprium, customary practices and clerks clearly predominated in Ghent throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the appearance of a few notaries in the fourteenth century suggests that ius commune and Roman law might have been included in the education of clerks. Murray, Notarial Instruments, pp. 24, 65–8. For the development of comital feudal courts, see Heirbaut, “Weduwen,” 16–8. 53. Gilissen, “Statut,” in La Femme, pp. 278–82 and 295–302; Heirbaut, “Weduwen,” 19–21. Ghent claimed jurisdiction over the estates of all citizens, as well as over its quarter. However, the city’s ability to enforce those privileges depended on its power compared to power of the Flemish count, who also claimed jurisdiction for certain offenses and heard appeals. Because the king of France was titular overlord of Flanders, cases might also be appealed to the Parliament of Paris. Nicholas, Town, pp. 155–7; Murray, Notarial Instruments, pp. 88–9; Henri Nowé, Les Baillis comtaux de Flandre: Des origines à la fin du XIVe siècle (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1929), pp. 328, 331. 54. There are more women who acted in their own names than the number of acts in Figure 2.1 indicates, because some acts included two or more women in that category. In addition, most of the acts in the “Women in More Than One” category included women who acted in their own names. 55. The list of patrician surnames is taken from Blockmans, Stadspatriciaat; the list of elite male names is my own compilation from lists of aldermen, bailiffs, city officials, tax farmers, suppliers of cloth and wine, and guild officials, taken from De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen; and Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen. Marc Boone developed this method to identify elite groups in Ghent in the Burgundian era. Boone, Gent, pp. 33–92. 56. SAG 301, 1, f. 112v, no. 2, 26 Nov. 1353. 57. SAG 301, 1, f. 215v, no. 8, 21 Aug. 1360. 58. Kowaleski, “Women’s Work,” in Women and Work, pp. 145–64; Mate, Women, pp. 1–v5. 59. There is no marital status designator for single women or women in the “unknown” category. I have categorized women identified by either their fathers’ or brothers’ names as single, and women who were not identified by any male family member as unknown. For this phenomenon in Douai, see Kittell, “Construction,” 220–25.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 173

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

174

NOTES

60. Ironically, the absence of male relatives’ names makes these women harder to trace. The repetition of women’s saints’ names complicates matters as well. 61. For example: “It was rare for a woman to have capital to invest in an occupation; her dowry went to support the household and her husband’s work, and his occupation took priority since he was regarded as the main breadwinner. It was only as a widow that a woman was able to decide how to use her resources, and her decision on whether to continue in her husband’s occupation depended on what was permitted by local custom, on her age and the ages of her children, and on the chances of remarriage.” Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500, Longman History of European Women (London: Longman Pearson Education, Ltd., 2002), p. 75. 62. SAG 301, 1, f. 103v, act no. 4, 3 Sept. 1353: [“Pieters Sneewers wijf [crossed out] wedewen.”] The crossed-out word “wife” is probably an insignificant error. 63. SAG 301, 1, f. 110r, act no. 3, 29 Oct. 1353: [“Aegte, Pieter Sneewers wedewe.”] 64. SAG 330, 11, f. 235r, act no. 3, 3 Apr. 1354: [“Aghaten Pieter Hijs soens dochter Pieters Sneuwers weduwe.”] 65. For example, a 1339 act listed the residents, two female and two male, of the four houses. The first woman was identified as “Heinric Suuwelaeren’s widow” and the next simply as “Zoetiin Troest.” SAG, series 1, f. 4r, act no. 1, 7 June 1339: [“Item, drie ende dertich scelghe par. daer Henrix Suuwelaren wedewe een huus up heeft staende. Item, drie ende dertich scelg. par. daer Zoetiin Troest een huus up heeft staende.”] 66. For widows in 15th-century Ghent, see Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 314–21. 67. SAG 301, 1, act no. 160v, act no. 1, 28 Nov. 1357: [“Kenlec zij etc. dat commen siin in propren persoene vor scepenen van der kuere in Ghend, Lievine den Amman ende zijnen ghesellen, Jan Walraven in den Quaetham ende Mergriete van den Pale siin wettelec wijf, kenden dat zij vercocht hebben Joncvr. Katelinen van den Wallekijne ser Jans wedewe van den Wallekiine al dat recht van herven die Mergrieten vornomt verstaerf ende toe cam van vrauwen Mergrieten van Cleempitte nonne te Zwijneve, haerre moyen was. . . .”] 68. SAG 301, 1, f. 233r, act no. 3, 16 Feb. 1361: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat van den tebatte ende ghedinghe dat was tusschen Janne Vogheleest an deene zijde ende Beatricen van Buxelaer an dander zijde als van gronde van hervachtecheden die hij hare eesschende was ende de bladinghe der af licghende in de prochie van Huesdiin zecghende dat soe hem toebehorde. Daer jeghen Beatrice vors. dede zecghen dat zoe die zelve herve cochte ende ghecreech vortijts ende dat zoe die ghehauden hadde in paisivelre possessie wel XXV jaer lanc ende tyts meer. Twelke hij hare consenterde ende het staen tharen eede, waerd zoe dat soe dat zoe [sic] zweeren dorfte dat zoe die zelve hervachtecheden ghecocht ende ghecreghen hadde zonder scamp ende also langhe tijt ghehouden hadde also ghesiet hadde,

9780230104952_10_not.indd 174

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

NOTES

69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

175

hij zoudse hare laten paisivelic ghebruke. Welke presentatie ende consent zoe an ghinc ende deder af haren eed mids den welken Janne vors. gheseit was naer tconsend dat hij dede dat hij sine hande dade van deser vors. hervachtecheden ende Beatricen die paisiveleec te laten ghebruke ghelijc haren propren goede. . . .”] Compare Kittell, “Audience,” 83–4. See Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 9, 51; Kowaleski, “Singlewomen,” in Singlewomen, pp. 46, 64, 336; Hutton, “On Herself,” 325–49. In the 1478 Ghent tax rolls, single women headed between 9.37 percent and 13.2 percent of all households. Willem Blockmans, “Peilingen naar de sociale strukturen te Gent tijdens de late 15e eeuw,” Studien betreffende de sociale strukturen te Brugge, Kortrijk en Gent in de 14e en 15e eeuw, by W. Blockmans, I. De Meyer, J. Mertens, C. Pauwelyn and W. Vanderpijpen, Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 139, Standen en Landen, no. 65 (Ghent: U.G.A., 1971), pp. 247–51 [215–62]. However, beguines could also be widows. State Archives of Ghent [Rijksarchief Gent]: Fonds Bisdom, series E, Beguinage of St. Elizabeth [Sint-Elizabethbegijnhof ], ff. 36r, 37v-40r. In this prosopographical analysis, I have adhered to the standards of the medieval historians at Ghent University. These standards are, in short: persons are most likely the same if they are connected to the same property, and if that cannot be established, the more points of commonality that can be established from multiple acts, the better. Persons from known patrician lineages were much less likely to be misidentified. I have also considered women of the same name that appeared with two or more of the same people in different acts to be the same woman. SAG 301, 1, f. 63v, act no. 1, 22 Apr. 1350. Boudin Dullaerds appears in many later acts: Van Werveke, Rekeningen (1351–1364), 1:5; SAG 301, 1, f. 113v.114r; Series 330, no. 11, f. 192v, act no. 5; f. 201v, act no. 2; f. 293v, act no. 4. SAG 301, 1, f. 64v, act no. 4, 4 May 1350: “Kenlijc si etc. dat Joncfr. Alise van der Pale Gillis wettelike wijf van der Pale quam voer scepenen van der kuere . . . kende ende lijde dat sij sculdech ware van wettegher scout Robrechte van Eeke VIII lib. gr. torn. dwelke si ghelovede te gheldene up haer selven ende up al thare te Sente Jans messe naest commende sonder eneghe fraude of malengien . . .” SAG 301, 1, f. 67v, act no. 4, 15 May 1350. SAG 301, 1, f. 199v, act no. 1, 12 May 1358. SAG 301, 1, f. 201v, act no. 1, 11 Aug. 1358. SAG 301, 1, f. 201v, act no. 1, 11 Aug. 1358. The clerk identified the women by their husbands’ names, but listed the women first and their husbands after, in a reversal of what is most common in Dutch (and English) syntax, as the following phrase shows: “. . . the Joncvrouw sisters and the husbands assign and order” the property changed. [die Joncvr. Beatrice Lievins wijf van Axele ende Joncvr. Kateline har zuster Lievins wijf van Hoerdeghem tegader hadden, up al tgoet daer Clais Rivisch har vader was, God hebbe de ziele, ute verstaerf. . . . die bovenghenomde

9780230104952_10_not.indd 175

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

176

NOTES

79. 80. 81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

XVIII lb. par. erf leker renten tsiaers den vors. joncvrouwen ghesustren ende haren mannen gheassigneirt ende bewijst te hebbene, te heffene, ende tontfane . . .] SAG 301, 1, f. 38r, act no. 2, 13 Dec. 1349. SAG 301, 1, f. 63r, act no. 4, 27 Apr. 1350. SAG 301, 1, f. 66r, act no. 3, 4 May 1350: “Kenlijc si etc. dat alse content ende ghescil was tusschen Gheerard van Masseminne an deene side ende Claise van Oterghem an dander side, omme alsulc goet, lant, have ende arve alse bleef achter Ghiseline uten Bloemen, so wijsden scepenen van der kuere in de stede van Ghend . . . dat Clais Gheerard ghenouch doen soude . . . van XIII s. ende VI d. gro . . .” In the second judgement, Beatrise was identified as Gherard’s vogtwijf, meaning that she owed him a mortmain (death duty) of the best chattel [beste kateel]. Whether the aldermen knew about this in the first judgement is not clear. In the third, Clais was identified as a dienstman, a variant of voogdman, meaning that he owed the same. Erik Thoen, Landbouwekonomie en bevolking in Vlaanderen gedurende de late Middeleeuwen en het begin van de modern tijden: testregio de kasselrijen van Oudenaarde en Aalst (eind 13de— eerste helft 16de eeuw), 2 vols. (Ghent: Belgisch Centrum voor Landelijke Geschiedenis, 1988), 1:431–5. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this information. SAG 301, 1, f. 3r, act no. 3, 19 June 1339. SAG 301, 1, f. 23v, act no.1: [“Ende te desen vors. ontfanghen so hebben de goede liede ghemeenlec vors. toesienricghe ghemaect Joncvrouw Mergrieten van Meenine omme de redene dat soe der toe te secghene heeft, also vele als scepenen bouc inhaudt, waer af soe transscrift thare wart heeft. . . .”] SAG 301, 1, f. 80r, act no. 1, 28 June 1350. SAG 301, 1, f. 88v, act no. 6.: [“. . . ver Lijsbetten van Sotteghem, ser Symoens wijf sNeckers, ende Lente Moelgies vors. quam voer scepenen mids pais faisant [ende] onthuucie hare van desen huse ende dedere ver Lijsbetten toe . . .”] “Ver” was a respectful title for a woman of elite status, and the male equivalent was “ser.”

3 “Her and All Her Property”: Gender and Property Transactions 1. SAG 301, 1, f. 225r, act no. 1, 1360–61. Tsuul was not Clementie’s surname from her family of origin, which is never given in the act. Instead she is identified as “Joncvrouw Clementie, Ogier Tsuul’s widow.” I have used “Tsuul” as a convenience for identification. 2. SAG 301, 1, f. 225r, act no. 1, 1360–61: [“. . . in lande ende andren goede . . .”] 3. [“. . . inne bringhen dat zoe wech hadde.”] 4. [“. . . an hare ute leide te coste onder stofferinghe ende ander goed ghenomen uten ghemeenen neste wel tote XX lib. gro. tor . . .”] Cf. Nicholas, Domestic Life, 111.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 176

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

NOTES

177

5. [“. . . in herven ende ghelde . . .”] 6. [“. . . in herven, cateilen ende ghelde . . .”] 7. Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 288–9; Meijers, Oost-vlaamsche erfrecht, pp. 32–3. 8. Ghent custom allowed the widow and children to keep their property together in an “extended community,” which Clementie and her children had maintained from the senior Ogier’s death. Meijers, Oost-vlaamsche erfrecht, pp. 87–8. 9. SAG 301, 1, f. 225r, act no. 1, 1360–61: [“. . . in ghemeenen neste zittende.”] 10. Pertinent examples from the text include: “. . . Clementie, the widow of Ogier Tsuuls came before the aldermen showing and explaining how and in what manner Ogier her husband and she provided for . . . [ Joncvr. Clementie Ogier Tsuuls wedewe es commen vor scepenen toeghende ende verclarende hoe ende in wat manieren Ogier haer man was ende zoe ute stelden]”; and “She and Ogier and Matthijs, both her sons, helped to work the property and to keep and manage [it] profitably [Ende zoe Ogier ende Matthijs beede hare zone tgoed [h]olpen winnen ende ten groete profite begaen ende bestaen.”] SAG 301, 1, f. 225r, act no. 1, 1360–61. 11. Kittell, “Audience,” 80–2. 12. Kittell, “Audience,” 80–2. 13. See among others, LoPrete and Evergates, “Introduction,” in Aristocratic Women, p. 4. 14. Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 150–1; Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 343–6. 15. Among others, see Sandy Bardsley, Women’s Roles in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 117–8. 16. See below, p. 70. 17. Meijers, Oost-vlaamsche erfrecht, pp. 84–5; Godding, Le Droit privé, #533, p. 302. 18. De Hemptinne, “Des Femmes copistes,” and Danneel, “Gender,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 133, 228; Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, p. 251; Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 5–10. 19. Meijers, Oost-vlaamsche erfrecht, p. 62. 20. Daneel, Weduwen, pp. 417–22; Boone, Gent, pp. 141–2; Carlier, “Solidariteit,” in Hart en marge, pp. 71–91; Jelle Haemers, De Gentse Opstand, 1449–1453: De Strijd tussen rivaliserende netwerken om het stedelijke kapitaal, Standen en Landen, 105 (Kortrijk-Heule, Belg.: U.G.A., 2004), pp. 94–101. 21. Boone, Gent, pp. 37–8. 22. The Women in More than One Category includes twenty-two wives and husbands, twenty women in their own names, seven represented women, and seven adult women under guardianship. 23. Excluding the 86 sales contracts whose principals were exclusively male, there were 142 contracts with women in total. There are nine patrimonial acts from the Adult Women under Guardianship category and an additional seven sales contracts with patrimonial phrases from the Women in More than One Category.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 177

2/9/2011 12:36:53 PM

178

NOTES

24. SAG 301, 1, f. 62r, act no. 1, 16 Apr. 1350: [“. . . Vort heift miin her Jan vors. gheloft dat hij commen sal binnen Ghend ende sal met hem bringhen miir vrouwen siin wettelike wijf ende dat zij beede den vors. Willem wettelike te sinen coepe van den huus en herve vors. doen sullen . . . .”] 25. The Women in More than One Category includes twelve wives and husbands, nine women in their own names, two represented women, and five adult women under guardianship. 26. SAG 301, 1, f. 120r, act no. 3, 5 Feb. 1354: [“Kenlic zij etc dat van den tebatte, contente ende ghescille dat was tusschen Everaerde van den Wincele ende sinen wiven an deene zijde ende Janne Oerneke als wettelic vocht ghestelt an de stede van Lelien Berevelts an dander zide als omme enech goet dat der vors. Lelien verstorven es van Lijsbetten sBlasers, Jans Bliex wijf, twelke de vors. Everaerde ende siin wijf gheanevert hadden, alse de vors. Jan Oerneke dede secghen ende toeghen, so wijsden scepenen van der cuere in Ghend . . . naer dat de vors. Everaerde ende siin wijf kenden ende verlijeden dat de vors. Lelie also wel oir es van der vors. Lijsbetten alse zij liede ende naer dat zij tvors. goet gheanevert hebben, dat zij den vors. Janne Oernike ter vors. Lelien bouf ghenouch doen sullen van alsulken goede als hare versceen ende verstaerf van der vors. Lijsbetten sBlasers ende eist also dat Everaerd ende siin wijf den vors. Janne Oernike in de name van Lelien vors. yet eesschende ziin daer af sta elc up siin recht van hemlieden.”] 27. In addition to the nineteen acts in the Wives with Husbands category in Figure 3.2, there are nine acts with wives and husbands in the Women in More than One Category. 28. The number of women in their own names is larger than the number of acts with women in their own names, because some acts had two or more women and some women in their own names come from acts classified as Women in More than One Category. 29. Two examples are SAG 301, 1, f. 188v, act no. 2, 14 May 1358; and f. 118r, act no. 1, 18 Jan. 1354. 30. SAG 301, 1, f. 21v, act no. 2, 23 Feb. 1346. See also f. 42r, act no. 4, 19 Dec. 1349; and f. 46v, act no. 5, 14 Feb. 1350. 31. SAG 301, 1, f. 113v-114r, 11 Dec. 1353. See also f. 27v, act no. 4, 16 August, 1349; and f. 154r, act no. 2, 20 Oct. 1357. 32. As wills and bequests were limited to one-third of the testator’s property, with different restrictions on different types of property, some of the bequests considered below might have been struck down by the aldermen of the Gedele. Meijers, Oost-vlaamsche erfrecht, pp. 50–5, 71; Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 317–18. Cf. Kittell, “Testaments,” 67. 33. SAG 301, 1, f. 10r, act no. 3, 31 Oct. 1343; f. 12r, act no. 2, 29 Jan. 1344; f. 227r, act no. 3, 2 Jan 1361, among others. See Marianne Danneel, “Quelques aspects du service domestique féminin à Gand d’après les registres et les manuels échevinaux des parchons (2ème moitié du XVème siècle),” in Sociale structuren en topografie van armoede en rijkdom in de 14de en 15de eeuw. Methodologische aspecten en resultaten van recent onderzoek.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 178

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

NOTES

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

179

Handelingen van het colloquium gehouden te Gent op 24 mei 1985, ed. W. Prevenier, R. Van Uytven, and E. van Cauwenberghe, Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 267 (Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1986), pp. 51–72. Bequests to servants: SAG 301, 1, f. 223v, act no. 1, 7 Dec. 1360; f. 251r, act no. 2, 27 June 1361. Maintenance contracts: f. 45v, act no. 1, 31 Dec. 1349; f. 105v, act no. 5, 24 Sept. 1353; f. 113v, act no. 5, 8 Dec. 1353; f. 172r, act no. 2, 28 Jan. 1358; among others. SAG 301, 1, f. 131r, act no. 3, 14 Apr. 1354; f. 165r, act no. 1, 1357; and f. 169v, act no. 3, 14 Jan. 1358. SAG 301, 1, f. 119r, act no. 3, 31 Jan 1354. See also f. 212v, act no. 3, 25 Sep. 1360; f. 142r, act no. 1, 2 Aug. 1354. Cf. Kittell, “Testaments,” 59; Danneel, Weduwen, p. 392. Each of the markets included both movable and immovable property, as do many of the sales contracts themselves. For annuities, see below. Some sales contracts do not appear in Figure 3.4 because the property in question did not fall into any of the three markets. For the Acts with Women in More than One Category, in the urban real estate market, there are six wives and husbands, five women in their own names, five adult women under guardianship, and two represented women. In the annuities market, there are nine wives and husbands, seven women in their own names, one adult women under guardianship, and three represented women. In the rural real estate market, all five acts include wives and husbands and women in their own names. Ten women sold rural land, and only one bought rural land. Two women acted as representatives for a male relative, and another donated land that her late husband had purchased. In the urban property market, twenty-one women sold and seven bought property in their own names. SAG 301, 1, f. 218v, act no. 2, 5 Nov. 1360; and f. 58r, act no. 2, 27 March 1350, among others. In the annuities market, twenty-two women sold and twelve bought annuities in their own names. David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City 1300–1500, A History of Urban Society in Europe (New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 198–9; Hans-Peter Baum, “Annuities in Late Medieval Hanse Towns,” The Business History Review 59 (1985): 24–48; M. Boone, K. Davids, and P. Janssens, eds., Urban Public Debts: Urban Government and the Market for Annuities in Western Europe (14th–18th centuries), Studies in European Urban History, 1100– 1800 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); John Munro, “The Usury Doctrine and Urban Public Finances in Late-Medieval Flanders (1220 -1550): Rentes (annuities), Excise Taxes, and Income Transfers from the Poor to the Rich,” in La fiscalità nell’economia Europea secc. XIII–XVIII = Fiscal systems in the European economy from the 13th to the 18th centuries : atti della “Trentanovesima settimana di studi” 22–26 aprile 2007, ed. Istituto internazionale di storia economica F. Datini, and Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2008), pp. 975, 983–4 [973-–]; online at Munich

9780230104952_10_not.indd 179

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

180

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

NOTES

Personal RePCc Archive [electronic archive] Paper No. 11012, posted 09 October 2008, available at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11012/ Murray, Bruges, pp. 134–5, and M. Galvin, “Credit and Parochial Charity in Fifteenth-Century Bruges,” Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 131–54. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp.113–4, 204–18; Munro, “Usury,” pp. 983–4; Baum, “Annuities,” 24–48. A redemption rate of 6 percent is specified in SAG 301, 1, f. 127v, act no. 1, 2 Apr. 1354: “. . . he [can] buy it back from her at the rate of 16 d. for every 1 d. . . .” [en ware ofte hijt lofede jeghen hare elken penninc om XVI d.] My thanks to Tim Soens for this interpretation. Boone, Dumon and Reusens, Immobiliënmarkt, p. 58. SAG 301, 1, f. 29v, act no. 2, 7 Oct. 1349; f. 117r, act no. 7, 11 Jan. 1354; f. 161v, act no. 1, 26 Sep. 1357; f. 164r, act no. 1, 26 Sep. 1357; and f. 224v, act no. 3, 16 Dec. 1360. SAG 301, 1, f. 149v, act no. 3, 10 Sep. 1357. SAG 301, 1, f. 5v, act no. 4, 26 Aug. 1339. SAG 301, 1, f. 31r, act no. 5, 28 Oct. 1349. See Marc Boone, Karel Davids, and Paul Janssens, “Urban Public Debts from the 14th to the 18th Century. A New Approach,” and James D. Tracy, “On the Dual Origins of Long-Term Urban Debt in Medieval Europe,” in Urban Public Debts, 9–10 [3–12] and 18 [13–26]; Baum, “Annuities,” 38–9. Murray, Bruges, pp. 134–5; Baum, “Annuities,” 34–6, 46–8 (although Baum does not mention women). Nicholas, Town, p. 12; Boone, Gent, pp. 122, 191, 243. SAG 301, 1, f. 15v, act no. 1, 4 July 1344 ( Joncvrouw Lijsbette van Drongen, member of the noble Courtoisins family); f. 84r-v, 1350 (“edele liede vrouwe Lijsbette van Leuwerghem wedewe mijns her Willeme was van Leuwerghem, vrouwe van Burst”, a noblewoman); f. 133v, act no. 6, 2 June 1354 (“Lijsbette Pieters wedewe van Herzeele”, unknown status.) Frederik Buylaert, “Eeuwen van ambitie: Edelen, steden en social mobiliteit in laatmiddeleeuwse Vlaanderen” (Ph.D. diss., Ghent University, 2008), Overzicht Vlaamse Adel database. SAG 301, 1, f. 140r-v, 24 July 1354. David Kusman, “Jean de Mirabello dit van Haelen (ca. 1280–1333). Haute finance et Lombards en Brabant dans le premier tiers du XIVe siècle,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 77 (1999): 843–931; P. Rogghé, “Mirabello, Simon de,” in Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek, vol. 1, columns 709–12 (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1964–2002). Ellen E. Kittell, From Ad Hoc to Routine: A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1991), 157. Kusman, “Jean de Mirabello,” 861; Kittell, Ad Hoc, pp. 168 and 210 Appendix B. Nicholas, Arteveldes, 19–71. Rogghé, “Mirabello,” cols. 709–12.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 180

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

NOTES

181

62. Kusman, “Jean de Mirabello,” 837; De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 2:351–2, 356–7; Rogghé, “Mirabello,” cols. 709–12. 63. This was four years after Simon’s death. SAG 301, 1, f. 47r, no. 3, 29 Jan. 1350. 64. SAG 301, 1, f. 72r-v, 7 June 1350. The Vaernewijc family was noble, but they played an extremely involved role in city life, as their feudal lands adjoined the city. F. Blockmans, Stadspatriciaat, pp. 268–9. 65. Godding, Le Droit privé, #486, 528, pp. 273–4, 299–300. 66. Godding, Le Droit privé, #552, pp. 311–2. 67. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 266–9. 68. SAG 330, 11, f. 13r–14r, Oct. 18, 1350: [“Item, ten poynte van den goede dat ghecreghen was binnen huwelike, te Eeclo, te Capericke, te Lembeke, ende daer omme trent, so wijsen vindren na tconsent van partien, alse verre alst leen es ende mijn heer ontfinc mire vrouwen hare bilevinghe, ende alse verre alst eerve es deene helft mire vrouwen alse haer proper goed, ende in dander heelft hare bilevinghe ende sire cateyle die ghedeelech . . .”] 69. Some of the properties described are obviously conglomerates, like “the annuities at Bruges” or “the property at Eeklo, Kaprijk, and Lembeke and the surrounding area.” SAG 301, 1, f. 59r, act no. 3, 10 Mar. 1350; f. 77r, act no. 2, 10 Mar. 1350; f. 72r-v, 7 June 1350; f. 85v, act no. 1, 9 Aug. 1350, f. 104v, act no. 1, 27 Aug. 1353; f. 124r, act no. 4, 10 Mar. 1354; SAG 330, 11, f. 13r-14r, 18 Oct. 1350; f. 56r-57v, Dec. 1350/Jan. 1351; f. 128r, act no. 1, 3 Apr. 1352. 70. SAG 301, 1, f. 47r, no. 3, 29 Jan. 1350. 71. SAG 330, 11, f. 56r-57v, Dec. 1350–Jan. 1351. 72. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 287. 73. SAG 330, 11, f. 56r-57v, Dec. 1350–Jan. 1351. 74. SAG 330, 11, f. 56r-57v, Dec. 1350–Jan. 1351. 75. SAG 301, 1, f. 50v-51r, 6 Feb. 1350. 76. In the customary procedure “costbodinghe van eede,” if the widow of a debtor denied that the debt was legitimate, the creditor challenged her to confirm or deny that under oath. If the widow accepted the costbodinghe, she swore an oath denying the debt, and by that oath she was freed from the claim. She could also pass back the costbodinghe to claim that the creditor should swear a confirming oath instead. If the creditor swore this, the widow had to pay the debt. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 300. 77. Coutume Gand, rubric XX, nos. 4 and 18, pp. 86, 92. 78. Coutume Gand, rubric XX, nos. 1–7, pp. 86–88. 79. SAG 301, 1, f. 47r, no. 3, 29 Jan. 1350: [“Kenlijc sij etc. dat ene edele vrouwe ende werde vrouwe Lijsbette mijne her Symoens wijf was van Halen nu wettelike wijf mijn her Arnoude van Huerne her van Rommene quam voer scepenen van der kuere in de stede van Ghend, her Gillis Rijnvische ende sinen ghesellen, kende en verlijde dat sij bi sekere compositien ende bi vorwaerden die sij ghemaect hadden dat sculdech ware Woutren van der Hasselt VIII lib gr. torn. van achterstellinghen alse van

9780230104952_10_not.indd 181

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

182

80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

NOTES

lifrenten die de vors. Woutere heeft up mier vrouwen vors. De welke somme van ghelde mier vrouwe vors. beloofde te gheldene Woutren vors. of de bringher van desen lettre te Sente Jans messe in midden sommer naest comende sonder fraude af malengien, ende waert dat ane mier vrouwen dan iet ghebrake so heeftet, beloeft Symoen ser Domaes alse borghe in al tselve dat mier vrouwe belooft heeft ende hem selven in der selver maniere verbonden up hem up tsine.”] Blockmans, Stadspatriciaat, pp. 350, 438–447, 465; De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 1:2 and 24; 2:36 and 155, 3:398–399; Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, p. 16. SAG 301, 1, f. 59r, acts nos. 2 and 3, 10 Mar. 1350: [“. . . dat miin vrouwe ende miin her Symoen te gadre ghecreghen . . .”] and [“. . . die miir vrouwe ende miin her Symoen te gadre cochten ende ghecreghen . . .”] See also SAG 330, 11, f. 56r-57v, Dec. 1350–Jan. 1351. SAG 301, 1, f. 107r, act no. 2, 24 Sep. 1353. SAG, series 330, 11, f. 56r-57v, Dec. 1350–Jan. 1351, 301, 1, f. 104r, act no. 1, 3 Sep. 1353; f. 238v, 1361; Blockmans, Stadspatriciaat, pp. 258, 448–9, 511–2; Buylaert, “Overzicht.” SAG 330, 11, f. 128r, 3 Apr. 1352. Georg Asmussen, Die Lübecker Flandernfahrer in der zweiten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (1358–1408), Kieler Werkstücke. Reihe D. Beiträge zur europäischen Geschichte des späten Mittelalters 0936–4161, Hansekauf leute in Brügge, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 211, 297–8. The loan was for 3,020 f lorins, the equivalent of 245 pounds groot in 1353 money. Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, (London: Royal History Society, 1986), p. 215. SAG 301, 1, f. 72r-v, 7 June 1350. SAG 301, 1, f. 52r, act no. 1, 3 Mar. 1350; f. 82v, act no. 3, 7 June 1350; f. 85v, act no. 1, 9 Aug. 1350; series 330,11, f. 128r, 3 Apr. 1352. SAG 301, 1, f. 124r, act no. 4, 10 Mar. 1354. The property definitely originated from Simon de Mirabello, because the act includes a statement that Lijsbette, “min vrouwe van Hale[n],” had already sold her rights to usufruct from it. Danneel argues that in the late fifteenth century, husbands acted for their wives in the management of the wives’ personal property as a matter of course. The aldermen did not require the wives’ consent in practice. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 339. In the mid-fourteenth century, the aldermen did on occasion insist on a wife’s public consent, f. 79r, act no. 2, 8 July 1350. I believe that the aldermen took pains to verify at least once that the wife did not object to her husband’s actions, but that she was subsequently “known” to be inactive unless she indicated otherwise. Godding, Le Droit privé, #220–1, 515–7, 593, pp. 158, 291–3, 336–7; Jan Dumolyn, “Patriarchaal patrimonialisme. De vrouw als object in sociale transacties in het laatmiddeleeuwse Vlaanderen: familiale strategieën en gender posities,” Verslagen van het centrum voor genderstudies–UGent 12 (2003): 13–5 [1–28].

9780230104952_10_not.indd 182

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

NOTES

183

92. Philip van Massemine was lord of Sint-Joris, now St.-Joris-ten-Distel, which was in the quarter dominated by Bruges. In Nov. 1349, he appeared before the aldermen as a witness for his brother, the knight Jan van Massemine, Lord of Eke and Hundelgem, both territories within the Quarter of Ghent. SAG 301, 1, f. 38v, act no.1, 22 Nov. 1349; Boon, Regesten op de jaarregisters, 1:31, 114–5 and 118. 93. See Figures 3.3 and 3.5. In sixteen cases, the husband was only mentioned in his wife’s identifier. Two cases include an explicit statement of the husband’s consent to his wife’s act, and one case has a clause in which the husband empowered his wife to sell property, SAG 301, 1, f. 184r, act no. 2, 21 Feb. 1358; f. 250v, act no. 6, 25 June 1361; f. 81v, act no. 3, 20 July 1350. One wife delivered a charter (sales contract) written by her husband to the aldermen, and another wife’s brother-in-law promised that her husband would appear to confirm his wife’s act, f. 124, act no. 1, 18 Nov. 1353; f. 154r, act no. 4, 21 Oct. 1357. 94. See Figures 3.1 and 3.3.

4

Webs of Credit and Circulation of Wealth

1. SAG 301, 1, f. 186v, act no. 1, 22 Apr. 1358: [“. . . ende sal hare gheven eten, drincken, cleedre, cousen, scoen ende al dies hare behoevien zal tamelike na haren staet, also langhe alse leven sal.”] 2. SAG 301, 1, f. 186v, act no. 1: [“. . . een wijf in sPapenstraat, VI gro.”] 3. William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 1. 4. The figure of 11 percent is from Reyerson’s study of Montpellier; the 16 percent is Jordan’s synthesis of David Nicholas’ statistics for fourteenthcentury Ghent. Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 1–78; Kathryn Reyerson, “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier,” in Women and Work, pp. 117–44; Nicholas, Domestic Life, pp. 70–106. 5. Jordan, Women and Credit, p. 18. 6. Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 23, 77–78. 7. In this pattern, fourteenth-century Ghent closely resembles thirteenthcentury Genoa, a city in which women, most of whom were not widows, were principals in one-quarter of the commercial contracts. Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 69–70; Angelos, “Women in Genoese Commenda Contracts,” 299–312; Georges Jehel, “Le Rôle des femmes et du milieu familial à Gênes dans les activités commerciales au cours de la première moitié du XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 53 (1975): 193–215. 8. See Owen Hughes, “From Brideprice to Dowry,” 262–96; Chojnacki, “Dowries and Kinsmen,” in Women in Medieval Society, pp. 173–98; Molho, Marriage Alliance; Chabot, “La Loi,” 51–72. 9. The city accounts used Flemish deniers parisis, at 1/12 of a denier (penny) groot, which was based on the Flemish version of the gros tournois. Consumers used mites and half-mites (1/24 of a penny groot).

9780230104952_10_not.indd 183

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

184

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

NOTES

Murray, Bruges, pp. 123–70; John H. Munro, “Monetary Contraction and Industrial Change in the Late-Medieval Low Countries, 1335–1500,” in Coinage in the Low Countries, pp. 102–5 [95–161]; Spufford, Handbook, pp. 213–7; Van Werveke, Stadsfinanciën, pp. 146–52. Moneychanger-pawnbrokers, banks, market halls, and neighborhood arbiters kept their own records, which have not survived. Amounts under one pound groot were mostly handled by arbiters in markets or neighborhoods. Marc Boone, “Geldhandel en pandbedrijf in Gent tijdens de Bourgondische period: Politieke, fiscal en sociale aspecten,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 66.4 (1988): 767–91. These comparisons come from the 1420–21 annual register, which includes reasons for the debts. SAG, series 301, 26, no. 1, f. 8v, acts 8 and 9, 27 Sept. 1420; f. 9v, acts 7 and 9, 5 Oct. 1420; and f. 13r, act no. 9, 17 Oct. 1420. SAG 301, 1, f. 62v, act no. 2, 20 Apr. 1350: [“Kenlijc si etc. dat Willem van Artevelde ser Jans sone quam voer scepenen van der kuere . . . kende ende verlijde dat hi ware sculdech van gherecter scout Lijsbetten sBruwers XLVIII s. gro. ter goeder rekeninghen, de welke hi ghelovede te gheldene te drien paymenten, dats te weten, te Chinxenen naest commende XVI s. gro., ende te half ogheste daer na XVI s. gro., ende dan te Sente Bamesse daer na volghende XVI s. gro. sonder eneghe fraude ofte malengien.”] I have excluded acts that contain provisions for criminal penalties or restitution, but I follow the aldermen’s lead in including all vaguely worded damage awards as “debts” in this study. The aldermen adjudicated civil lawsuits over debts, trade issues, and property disputes, and frequently ordered a principal to pay damages. See Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 193–203. One gulden equaled 40 pennies groot. SAG 301, 1, f. 182r, no. 1, 9 Apr. 1358: [“Eyzoete Jan Louchys wijf heeft verkend dat zoe sculdech es Janne Haghelsteene dertiene guldine ende zes gro. Item, Kateline Haghelsteens een pond gro. Actum IX die aprilis up hare ende up al thare.”] SAG 301, 1, f. 129v, acts no. 2 and 3, 26 Apr. 1354; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 200–2. SAG 301, 1, f. 232v, act no. 4, 19 Feb. 1361. SAG 301, 1, a chirograph numbered 15bis, 7 July 1339. In Domestic Life (p. 80) Nicholas claims that husbands “nullified transactions done by their wives without their knowledge,” and he offers in evidence three folios (10r, 23r, 109r) from the earliest annual register of the aldermen of the Keure. When I examined these folios, I found no indication that husbands were repudiating their wives’ acts. In one case, the aldermen of Synay, a town north of Ghent, refused to hear a woman’s complaint because her husband was out of town. She appealed to the aldermen of Ghent, who ordered the aldermen of Synay to hear her case. SAG 301, 1, f. 23r, act no. 2. While it is true that the aldermen of Synay did not allow her to act, the aldermen of Ghent seemed to be in support

9780230104952_10_not.indd 184

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

NOTES

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

185

of her suit. Her husband was out of town and was not repudiating her efforts in any way. There are three cases on f. 10r that include women. One is a maintenance contract between a woman and her son-in-law and daughter, and the second is a debt acknowledgment that transfers the debt to a third party, with a quit declaration to the original debtor. The third case involves a sale of property by a man to a woman. The man promised that if “his wife does not want to leave, then Mergriete [the buyer] will place a man in her stead who will legally obtain a judgment at Jan’s [the seller’s] expense.” [ende waert so dat sijn wijf niet ute en wilde gaen, so saude Joncfr. Mergriete voers. eenen man setten in haer stede dat wetteliker af sal winnen up Jans cost voers.] While this clause does concern a potential disagreement between husband and wife, the husband was guaranteeing that the buyer would not be damaged if his wife disputed the sale, not repudiating a debt, f. 10r, act no. 1. On the third folio, there are several acts with women, but only one that involves a husband and wife. It says that the husband had done his pilgrimage (a common punishment for assault and other crimes) and “for his wife’s part they consider that he has paid” [de ghedeel bi sine wive die hilden hem daer af ghepait.] The “part” owed by his wife could be a debt, an obligation to go on pilgrimage, or a fine, and the circumstances are unclear. However, he paid it for her, which is the opposite of repudiation, f. 109r, act no. 3. SAG 301, 1, f. 223v, act no. 3, 5 Dec. 1360. SAG 301, 1, f. 227r, act no. 1, 23 Dec. 1360: [“. . . die hij seide dat hij Jacoppe haren man gheleend hadde. . . . daer jeghen Kateline vors. dede toeghen ende zecghen dat zoe van diere scult niet en wiste no ghehordten hadde binnen den levene van Jacoppe haren man . . .”] Two hundred and nine men and 38 women paid persemier [moneylenderpawnbroker] taxes between 1339 and 1361. Since these numbers include all individuals listed for each one-year period, there are many duplications, and the actual number of moneylender-pawnbrokers from the entire period is lower. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen 1:375, 2:11, 274, 350, 448, 3:16, 17, 410; Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 92, 188, 259, 373, 452–3. For moneylender-pawnbrokers in general, see David Kusman, “Financiers du Prince ou ‘usuriers publics’? Le Rôle des banquiers piémontais dans les villes du duché de Brabant (XIIIe-XIVe siècle)” (Ph.D. diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2007–08), 4: 489–95; Boone, “Geldhandel,” 767–87; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 205–6. SAG 301, 1, f. 48ter and 60v, act no. 2, 9 Apr. 1350: [“. . . welke summe van ghelde hem vortijts de vors. Kateline leende in sire groter noet in goeden ghereeden ghelde . . .”] Toets appears twice on the list of persemiers, in 1343 and 1345. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 2: 243 and 448; Nicholas, Domestic Life, pp. 89–90. Kusman, “Financiers du Prince,” 4: 491. A Jacob van der Maerct registered as a persemier in 1339, 1340, and 1353. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 1:375, 2:11; Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, p. 92.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 185

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

186

NOTES

24. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 1: 378–81. Jacob van Artevelde sent Ghent militias to suppress a rebellion in Courtrai against his own rebellious regime in 1339–40. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, p. 220. 25. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 1:378, 469. 26. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 1:378. 27. Noblewomen and some elite women were identified without names as well; examples are “the lady van Ravenscoet” (der vrouwen van Ravenscoet) or “the lady Sletsaerds” (de vrouwe Sletsaerds). De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 1: 378 and 469; Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 29, 95. The figures are taken from all the entries of forced loans and credit women extended to the city in any form in the two volumes cited earlier. The amounts of the loans and the women involved vary dramatically in ways that are usually not explained, so the following figures should only be taken as general indicators. 28. SAG 301, 1, f. 214r, act no. 4, 7 Oct. 1360. 29. SAG 301, 1, f. 43v, act no. 4, 4 Jan. 1350: [“. . . alle de cateile ende up alle de inhave . . . huute ghesteken den verwehallame ende den bruhallame . . .”] 30. The 1420–21 annual register often lists raw materials and finished products. SAG 301, 26. 31. For example: SAG 301, 1, f. 70v, act no. 2, 2 June 1350; f. 241v, act no. 2, 16 Apr. 1361; f. 132v, act no. 3, 28 May 1354. Most of the sales of real estate described in chapter 3 involved credit. 32. See, for example, SAG 301, 1, f. 20r, act no. 2, 16 Dec. 1345. 33. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 308–9, and Murray, Bruges, pp. 122–3. 34. Boone, Gent, pp. 57–9, 243–4. 35. Nicholas, Domestic Life, pp. 90–5. 36. SAG 301, 1, f. 67v, act no. 4, 18 May, 1350: [“. . . over de IIII (c) f lorine van den groten ghewechte die Jan Baudy [Bardi] van Florenchen leende meester Janne Uten Hove ende Gillis vors. int hof van Rome ten orbore ende profite van der stede van Ghend . . .”] 37. The eighteen acts in the Women in More Than One Category collectively include sixteen wives and husbands, seventeen women in their own names, two represented women, and three adult women under guardianship. 38. Jordan, Women and Credit, p. 23. 39. Adriaan Verhulst, “Prijzen van granen, boter en kaas te Brugge volgens de ‘slag’ van het Sint-Donatiaanskapittel (1348–1801),” in Dokumenten voor de geschiedenis van prijzen en lonen in Vlaanderen en Brabant, ed. C. Verlinden, 3 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1965), 2:14–17, 67. 40. Some acts do not specify an amount and are thus excluded. The 172 acts with active women include acts from the Women in Their Own Names and the Women in More Than One Category groups in Figure 4.1. 41. For nuns loaning at no interest, see Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 20, 30, 61–2. In the Ghent acts, male religious present themselves as creditors in the same way. 42. SAG 301, 1, f. 46v, act no. 3, 2 Feb. 1350.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 186

2/9/2011 12:36:54 PM

NOTES

187

43. SAG 301, 1, f. 66v, act no. 1, 8 May 1350: [“. . . Soy Baerd, Pieter de Scepper, ende de wedewe Jan Baerds commen siin . . .”] 44. B. Holderness, “Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay on their Economic Functions,” in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. R. Smith (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 423–42; Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 72–8, among many others. See also Danneel, Weduwen, p. 381. 45. Amy Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 128–41. 46. Boone, Davids, and Janssens, “Urban Public Debts,” in Urban Public Debts, p. 10; James Collins, “The Economic Role of Women in SeventeenthCentury France,” French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 436–70; Boone, “Geldhandel,” 789. 47. The number of loans for each group is as follows: Single and unknown women creditors made a total of eighty-six loans, but only seventysix list amounts. Widow creditors made only nineteen loans, of which sixteen list amounts. Male creditors made 468 loans, of which 411 list amounts. 48. Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 30, 456. 49. Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 96, 143. 50. SAG 330, 1, 123r, act no. 3, 3 Aug. 1352. 51. SAG 301, 1, f. 112v, act no. 1, 22 Nov. 1353. 52. SAG 301, 1, f. 4v-5r, 5 Aug. 1339; De Pauw, Rekeningen, 2:443. 53. SAG 330, 11, f. 163r, act no. 5, 4 Feb. 1353. 54. SAG 330, 1, f. 5r, act no. 2, 10 Oct. 1349; no. 11, f. 68v, act no. 9, 2 Sep. 1351; f. 215r, act no. 4, 1 Oct. 1353. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 153. 55. SAG 301, 1, f. 26r, act no. 3, 15 Aug. 1349: [“. . . eene edele en werde vrouwe vrouwe Ysabelle mijne her Gherards wijf van Oestende srudders . . . .”] 56. SAG 301, 1, f. 26r, act no. 3, 15 Aug. 1349: [“. . . scelt Heinr. ende Clais vors. quite mijn her Gherard ende mire vrouwen vors. van allen eessche . . .”] 57. SAG 301, 1, f. 44v-45r, 29 Dec. 1349: [“. . . Vranken van den Hamme ende Joncvr. Mergriete sinen sinen [sic] wive . . .”] 58. There is a note in the lefthand margin of f. 44v: “Solutum est.” 59. Godding, Le Droit privé, #549, p. 309; Murray, “Family,” 122. 60. SAG 301, 1, f. 46r, act no. 1, 27 Jan. 1350. 61. SAG 330, 11, f. 14v, act no. 4, 26 Jan. 1350. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 132–5. 62. [“Kenlic sij etc. dat Mergriete Vrancs wijf van den Hamme bi consente van Vranken haren man es commen voer scepenen . . .”] SAG 330, 11, f. 14v, act no. 4, 26 Jan. 1350. 63. [“Ende deze voers. peneghe heeft Mergriete voers. verzekert up hare ende up al thare zo waer dat gheleghen of ghestaen es binnen Ghent of der buten.”] SAG 330, 11, f. 14v, act no. 4, 26 Jan. 1350. 64. SAG 330, 11, f. 129r, act no. 1, 30 Aug. 1351. 65. SAG 330, 11, f. 90r, act no. 5, f. 162r, act no. 7 and f. 163r, act no. 5. 66. SAG 301, 1, f. 4v-5r, 5 Aug. 1339.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 187

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

188

NOTES

67. SAG 301, 1, f. 129r, act no. 2, 21 Apr. 1354: [“. . . Daer tseghen dat sij daden toeghen dat hijt daer niet sculdech ware te hebbene, want de vors. plecke van moure ghecreghen ende ghecocht ware ende gheleghen in eene stede gheheeten Wulfsden, also hare tsaertren wel verclaren . . . .”] 68. SAG 301, 1, f. 129r, act no. 2, 21 Apr. 1354: [“. . . der vors. wedewe ende her Heinric vors. bi der redenen dat haerlieder tsaertre spreect up eene speciale ghenomde stede gheheeten Wulfsden daer de vors. mour in gheleghen es.”] 69. Barbara Hanawalt notes this pattern as well. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 79–89. 70. SAG 301, 1, f. 64r, act no. 1, 16 Apr. 1350. 71. SAG 330, 11, f. 19v, act no. 3, 10 Dec. 1350. 72. SAG 301, 1, f. 57r, act no. 1, 1350. 73. SAG 330, 11, f. 19v, act no. 3, 10 Dec. 1350. 74. She was an adult woman under guardianship in the act discussed earlier (330, 11, f. 19v, act no. 3); part of a husband-and-wife partnership in two acts relating to the Van Oestende loan (301, 1, f. 44v-45r and f. 46r, act no. 1) and the first lawsuit against Jan Scettorf (301, 1, f. 64r, act no. 1); and a woman in her own name before the aldermen of the Gedele borrowing money with Frank’s consent from the property of Mergriete de Pape (330, 11, f. 14v, act no. 4), paying money Frank had promised (330, 11, f. 129r, act no. 1), and in a 1360 act in which she gives property to her new husband, Heinric den Hoese (301, 1, f. 228v, act no. 2). She also appeared in five acts during her widowhood. 75. SAG 330, 1, f. 14v, act no. 4, 26 Jan. 1350. 76. SAG 330, 11, f. 163r, act no. 5, 4 Feb. 1353. 77. SAG 330, 11, f. 162r, act no. 7, 4 Feb. 1353; f. 163r, act no. 5, 4 Feb. 1353. 78. SAG 330, 11, f. 163v, 15 Feb. 1353. 79. SAG 301, 1, 228v, act no. 2, 12 Jan. 1361. 80. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 273. 81. SAG 301, 1, f. 77v, act no. 2, 21 June 1350: [“. . . die hij hare gheloft heift to gheldene ende te betaelne te haren wille en vernaenne zonder enich langher respijt.”] 82. Some examples include SAG 301, 1, f. 115r, act no. 3, 20 Dec. 1353; f. 134v, act no. 1, 13 June 1354; f. 213v, act no. 1, 30 Sep. 1360; f. 222v, act no. 1, 24 Nov. 1360; f. 118v, act no. 2, 27 Jan. 1354; f. 251r, act no. 4, 1 July 1361. 83. SAG 301, 1, f. 250r, act no. 2, 19 June 1361: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat Jan Willaens . . . heeft ghelooft te vermoeden ende ghenouch te doene Lijsbetten sinen wettel. wive van I lb. g. tor. ontheir ende Sente Bamesse eerst commende sonder langher respijt.”] 84. SAG 301, 1, loose chirograph numbered 255.1 in front of f. 255, 4 Aug. 1361: [“. . . van allen den coemanscepe die soe ende Lambrecht haer zone te gadre ghedaen hebben . . .”]

9780230104952_10_not.indd 188

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

NOTES

189

85. SAG 301, 1, f. 45v, act no. 2, 16 Dec. 1349; f. 14r, act no. 2, 23 Apr. 1344; f. 78v, act no. 2, 22 June 1350; among others. See also Marjorie K. McIntosh, “Women, Credit, and Family Relationships in England, 1300–1620,” Journal of Family History 30.2 (April 2005): 143–63. 86. SAG 301, 1, f. 119r, act no. 1, 30 Jan. 1354; f. 120v, act no. 4, 5 Feb. 1354; f. 129v, act no. 2, 26 Apr. 1354. 87. SAG 301, 1, 23v, act no. 2, 13 July 1346: [“. . . Joncfr. Mergriete Jans dochter van Ghend es commen vor scepenen van den kuere Ghend met haren maghen ende vrienden ende metgaders Joncfr. Marien van den Kerchove harer moyen . . .”] 88. [“. . . omme meerre grief ende scade te werne ende te wederstane . . .”] SAG 301, 1, 23v, act no. 2, 13 July 1346. 89. Jordan, Woman and Credit, p. 26. 90. SAG 301, 1, f. 157v, act no. 4, 15 Nov. 1357. For Jacob van Overdwater, see Van Werveke, Stadsfinanciën, pp. 75–7. 91. SAG, series 301, 1, f. 138v, act no. 4, 26 July 1354. For the Ute Merham aldermen and tax farmers, see De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 3:1, and Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 307, 432, 494, 503, 547–8, 555–6. 92. SAG 301, 1, f. 235r, act no. 4, 14 Feb. 1361; Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 16, 371. 93. Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 85, 369. 94. SAG 301, 1, f. 228v, act no. 5, 14 Jan. 1361. 95. SAG 330, 11, f. 95r, act no. 2, 7 Feb. 1352. 96. SAG 301, 1, f. 75v, act no. 5, 19 July 1350. See also f. 213r, act no. 6. For noble indebtedness in medieval Flanders, see Warlop, Flemish Nobility, pp. 276–83, 296–8; Nicholas, Town, pp. 250–1.

5

Married Partners and Single Women as Producers and Sellers

1. Herman Pleij, “Inleiding: Op belofte van profijt,” in Op belofte van profijt: Stadsliteratuur en burgermoraal in de Nederlandse letterkunde van de middeleeuwen, ed. Herman Pleij (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 8–52. 2. Jan van Boendale, Der leken spieghel, leerdicht van den jare 1330, door Jan van Boendale, gezegd Jan de Clerc, schepenklerk te Antwerpen, ed. M. de Vries, 3 vols. (Leiden: Werken uitgegeven door de vereeniging ter bevordering der oude Nederlandsche letterkunde, 1844–1848), vol. 1, bk. 25, l. 85–92. 3. Der leken spieghel, l. 108–24. 4. Pleij, “Inleiding,” in Op Belofte,” pp. 8–52; Howell, “Land to Love,” 221–2. 5. Kowaleski, “Singlewomen,”in Singlewomen, pp. 46–7. 6. Nicholas, Domestic Life, pp. 70–106; Danneel, Weduwen en wezen, pp. 349–82; Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy, pp. 70–94, 124–58; Murray, Bruges, pp. 300–326; Kloek, “Vrouwenarbeid aan banden gelegd?”;

9780230104952_10_not.indd 189

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

190

NOTES

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Van Gerven, “Vrouwen, arbeid en sociale positie”; De Hemptinne, “Des Femmes copistes”; Stabel, “Women at the Market”; Kittell, “Guardianship” and “Construction”; Kittell and Queller, “Whether.” Boone, De Hemptinne and Prevenier, “Gender and Early Emancipation,” 24–5; Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy, pp. 9–26. Only 105 acts in the aldermen’s registers from 1339 through 1361 mention products or services related to craft production. For background on crafts and guilds, see Van Houtte and Van Uytven, “Nijverheid,” in AGN, 4:87–111; Boone and Prevenier, La Draperie ancienne; Boone, “Les Métiers”; Nicholas, Metamorphosis; Stabel, “Guilds”; M. Prak, C. Lis, J. Lucassen and H. Soly, eds., Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power and Representation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); H. Soly, “The Political Economy of the European Craft Guilds,” International Review of Social History 53 suppl. (2008), 45–71; Clare Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research,” International Review of Social History 53 (2008): Supplement, 19–44. One exception: a quality control inspector for the Cloth Hall, on the only surviving list, dated 1415. Boone, Gent, pp. 139–40. Hanawalt, “Introduction,” in Women and Work, pp. vii–xviii; Erler and Kowaleski, “Introduction,” in Gendering the Master Narrative, pp. 1–16. Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy, pp. 23–6; Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters, p. 7. Boone, Gent, p. 71. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California, 1984), pp. 115–8, 125–30. SAG 330, 1, loose chirograph numbered 215.1. Vannieuwenhuyse numbers this f. 7v, act no. 8. Vannieuwenhuyse, Regesten, pp. 1–2. Although lists like this were common, they were usually made by the surviving spouse as a “deelbrief.” Most have not survived. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 267–9. Of the 741 debt-related acts from 1339 to 1361, the acts with only men amounted to 63 percent, those with women acting in their own names to 24 percent, and those with husband-and-wife economic partnerships to 6 percent. See Figure 4.1 for more details. SAG 330, 1, f. 215.1, 21 Aug. 1360: The right margin of this chirograph is degraded and partially illegible. Brackets enclosing underscoring mark the missing text, but the text passages enclosed by brackets are my interpretations and clarifications. [“Actum XXI die augusti anno LX. Her Pieter van der Damme maecte goed met sinen ede met sijns wijfe, sijns soens Arnouds ede ende sijns knapen, in alse velen als hijs weet, ede diet tgrot wracht dat hem Wouter van Vinderhout ende Aechte siin wijf sculdech siin tusschen den XXXVIII ende XLIII s. gr. van verwere, _______ dat gherekent es ende ongherekent.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 190

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

NOTES

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

191

Mergriete Jacops wijf van Lovendeghem haudt bi haren ede dat Wouter van Vinderhaute ende siin wijf Jacob haren man ende hare sculdech siin van van (sic) I vierendele van I zacke wullen III lb. III s. VI d. gr. Item, Lievin van Omelroden kend up sinen eed dat _______ van der wullen alse vele ghedrough maer af her iet up betaelt es weet hi niet. Lievin siin zone idem. Ver Kateline sVos haudt bi haren ede dat hare Wouter vors. sculdech es van ziden XIX gul. ende I gr. lettel meer of min. Meester Lievin hare zone, idem. Jan de Blaeuwere haudt bi sinen ede dat hem Wouter vors. sculdech es van blauwerie XLIII s. gr. Item, Oste siin knape ___ Gillis Mond in den name van sijr moeder hilt bi sinen ede dat hare Wouter vors. et uxor siin schuldech XXIII gul. van Willem di____ hem vercocht heeft. Jan de Beisere heeft gheprouft met Everdeye Robbe ende Dierine van der Beke dat sij horden verlien Aghten Wouters wive van ______ dat soe ende hare man hem sculdech siin XLII s. II d. gr. van boteren. Item, het gheprouft dat Wouter ende siin wijf vors. sculdech siin her Janne Dotter I scild van gheleenden ghelde. Item, Dierin van der Beke hoorde Woutren ende siin wijf verlien dat sij sculdech siin Kateline Borluuts maer hi en weet niet ho___ Item, Pieter van den Damme hilt up sinen eedt dat Achte van Vinderhoute Wouters wijf vors. van Vinderhoute verkende dat s___________ was Lodewike van der Eeke vive guldine ende een alven. Actum XXII die augusti. Boudin van Vinderhoute hilt up sinen eedt dat Aechte Wouters wijf was van Vinderhoute kende dat so sculdech ___ tghelt van IIII waerpten Kateline Borluuts uteghenomen viere scilden die Kateline in minddringhen der af ontfae___”] This figure does not include the unspecified amount owed to Kateline Borluut for four warps. Van Caenegem, Strafprocesrecht, p. 88; Kittell, “Audience”, 76–78. Coutume Gand, Coutume Homologuée, rubric XX, nos. 2 and 10, p. 86–8. Munro, “Symbiosis,” 53. Rudolf Holbach, “Some Remarks on the Role of ‘Putting-out’ in Flemish and Northwest European Cloth Production,” in La Draperie ancienne, pp. 234–5 [207–49]. Endrei, “Manufacturing,” in Textiles, pp. 14–23. Boone, “L’Industrie,” in Draperie ancienne, p. 18. Yoshio Fujii, “Draperie urbaine et draperie rurale dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux au bas moyen âge: Une Mise au point des recherches après H. Pirenne,” Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990): 77–97; Van der Wee, “Structural Changes,” pp. 203–21; Munro, “Symbiosis,” 1–74; Chorley,

9780230104952_10_not.indd 191

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

192

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

NOTES

“Cloth Exports,” 349–79; Boone, “L’Industrie,” in Draperie ancienne, pp. 15–62. Hans Van Werveke, De koopman-ondernemer en de ondernemer in de Vlaamsche lakennijverheid van de middeleeuwen, Mededelingen van de koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunsten van België, klasse de letteren 8 (Antwerp: Standaard, 1946); Van Houtte and Van Uytven, “Nijverheid,” in AGN, 4:99; Howell and Boone, “Becoming Early Modern,” 320–1; Holbach, “Putting-out,” in Draperie ancienne, p. 234. This is more by implication (that women drapers are never mentioned) rather than by direct statement. Boone, “L’Industrie,” and Holbach, “Putting Out,” in Draperie ancienne, pp. 38–40, 214, 220–5; Stabel, “Guilds,” 204–6. For the role of guilds in limiting women’s access, see Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds,” 19–20, 44–45. Boudin van Vinderhoute appears as an apprentice in the 1351–52 list of those who paid a special tax assessment levied on weaver masters and apprentices (Weversleerknapengeld). Wouter van Vinderhoute does not appear at all on this list, nor in any of the shorter lists in 1352–53, 1353–54, 1354–55, 1357–58, or 1358–59, nor on the list of rebels (many of them weavers) pardoned by the count in 1359. Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 1–8, 24, 93–5, 141–2, 316–7, 379; De Pauw, Cartulaire, pp. 711–8. In addition, the property inventory does not include a loom. See also Boone, De Hemptinne, and Prevenier, “Gender and Early Emancipation,” in Gender, Power and Privilege, p. 24. For women drapers in other cities of the Low Countries, see Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 77–78, Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy, pp. 93–4, among others. Van Werveke, Koopman-ondernemer, 24. SAG 330, 1, f. 219r, act no. 3, 9 Nov. 1360: [“. . . Mergriete sPloughers Heinrics wife was Oedonc heeft verkend ende verlijt dat in de tiden die Heinric vors. levende, de vors. Heinric ende zoe te gader cochten jeghen Jurdane Sersanders twee zacke wullen omme eene somme van ghelde draghende ommetrent neghentiene ponde gro. tor. lettel min of lettel meer te goeder rekeninghen, in deser vormen en conditien, dat Heinric ende zoe de vors. wulle bereeden zouden ende deraf lakene maken. Ende met dien laken van diere wullen ghemaect dat sij daer mede paiment doen zouden den vors. Jurdane van den vors. ghelde.”] De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 2:1 and 3:1; Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, p. 369; Blockmans, Stadspatriciaat, pp. 4, 92, 350, 550. These were the lowest paid jobs in wool cloth production, and they were not organized into guilds. The occupational titles appear only in the female form: “cnoopsterigghen,” (nappers), “camsterigghen” (combers), “spinsterigghen” (spinsters), “breysteriggen,” “kaertsterigghen,” (carders), “trecsteriggen,” and “treksters,” (carders). Danneel, Weduwen, p. 371; Munro, “Symbiosis”; De Poerck, La Draperie médiévale, 3:44–68; Dominique

9780230104952_10_not.indd 192

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

NOTES

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

193

Cardon, La Draperie au Moyen Âge: Essor d’une grande industrie européenne (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1999), pp. 145–312. Endrei, “Manufacturing,” 16, 21. Endrei, “Manufacturing,” 14. Soly, “Political Economy,” 47–50. A few Ghent ordinances refer to carders (forbidding them to card wool with iron or copper implements, 1349) and “kemstericghe” (female combers) (forbidding them to have more than three stones of wool in their houses, 1353.) De Pauw, Voorgeboden, pp. 49, 64; Holbach, “Putting-out,” in Draperie ancienne, pp. 207–49. For examples of women drapers in thirteenth-century Ghent, see Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, eds., Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre. Première partie: des origines à l’époque bourguignonne, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1909) n. 405, p. 386, n. 410, p. 398, n. 411, pp. 398–399, no. 414, pp. 401–2. For Douai, see Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 77–8. In sixteenth-century Leiden, perhaps as much as 30 percent of drapers were women. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, pp. 70–7. For Bruges, see Murray, Bruges, p. 308. De Poerck, Draperie médiévale, 1:70–2; Endrei, “Manufacturing,” in Draperie ancienne, p. 18. While the physical strength required for the horizontal loom was considerable, capital costs, guild formation and control, and the increase in prestige and profit in manufacture of wool cloth may also have played a role in regendering weaving as a male occupation. Ruth Mazo Karras, “ ‘This Skill in a Woman Is By No Means to Be Despised’: Weaving the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 94–7 [89–104]. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 150–2, 160–9. SAG 330, 1, f. 170v-171r, 5 Jan.1358; f. 162v, act no. 2, 13 Dec. 1357; and f. 163v, act no. 1, 1357–58. Endrei, “Manufacturing,” 20; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 163–9. The 1350 guild regulations of the shearers (droogschreeders) only mention women in connection with forbidding shearers, their wives, and their children from running taverns. Frans De Potter, Gent van de oudsten tijd tot heden: geschiedkundige beschrijving der stad, 8 vols. (Ghent: Familia et Patria Handzame, 1883; reprinted 1969), 3:633–8. Boone, “L’Industrie,” in Draperie ancienne, pp. 45–7; De Pauw, Voorgeboden, p. 166. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 164–5; Stabel, “Women at the Market,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 273–5; Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 350–7. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 354–61; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 260–75, Domestic Life, p. 99. Stabel, “Guilds,” 193–4, and Boone, “L’Industrie,” in Draperie ancienne, p. 50.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 193

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

194

NOTES

48. Stabel, “Women at the Market,” in Secretum Scriptorum, p. 275; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 266–87. 49. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, pp. 163–4; Soly, “Political Economy,” 52–7; Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds,” 19–22. 50. De Potter, Gent, 4:576. 51. [“. . . so wie name ende troude eens vry barbiers dochter, dat haer man bevryet soude wesen int vornomde ambacht te doene ghelijc andren vryen barbiers . . .”] SAG, series 156, no. 1, f. 47 and 471, undated, transcribed by Marc Boone. Cf. Danneel, Weduwen, p. 355, note 486. 52. SAG, series 156, no. 1, f. 452, undated, transcribed by Marc Boone. 53. For example, Davis, “Women in the Crafts,” in Women and Work, p. 172. 54. J. Gessler, ed., Het Brugsche Livre des Mestiers en zijn navolgingen (Bruges: Consortium van Brugsche drukkers, 1931); Stabel, “Women at the Market,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 263–5. 55. De Hemptinne, “Des Femmes copistes,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 129–44; Van Gerven, “Vrouwen, arbeid en social positie,” 947–66. 56. De Potter, Gent, 5:636. 57. Girls and boys were sent to school and usually received the same basic education. De Ridder-Symoens, “Stad en kennis,” in Hart en Marge, p. 135. 58. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns,” pp. 101–43; Boone, De Hemptinne and Prevenier, “Gender and Early Emancipation,” in Gender, Power and Privilege, pp. 22–4. 59. Haemers, Gentse Opstand, pp. 114–5. 60. However, evidence from early modern Germany shows pregnant wives engaging in heavy labor in many crafts, while single women were limited to a few trades, such as spinning. Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 41, 269. The idea that single women should have wider access to occupations than married women busy with childcare may be a modern notion. 61. Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds,” 19–44; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, p. 191; Boone, De Hemptinne and Prevenier, “Gender and Early Emancipation,” in Gender, Power and Privilege, p. 25. 62. [“. . . het ne ware dat hem de meester ofte twijf claerreerden bi haren eede dat sijs niet en wisten.”] De Pauw, Voorgeboden, p. 21. 63. Farmer, “It Is Not Good,” in Singlewomen, p. 85; Boone, Dumon, and Reusens, Immobiliënmarkt, pp. 230–2; Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 48–51; Tanya Stabler, “Now She Is Mary, Now She Is Martha: The Beguines of Paris in Medieval Society and Clerical Imagination” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006), 115–64. 64. Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja Van Damme, eds., Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800), 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Peter Arnade, Martha Howell, and Walter Simons,

9780230104952_10_not.indd 194

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

NOTES

65.

66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

195

“Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe,” and Marc Boone, “Urban Space and Political Conf lict in Late Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002): 515–48 and 621–40. Parts of this analysis have appeared in Shennan Hutton, “Women, Men, and Markets: The Gendering of Market Space in Late Medieval Ghent,” in Urban Space: The Experience of Urban Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 409–31. It was located to the north of the present cloth hall (Lakenhalle), which was constructed in the mid-fifteenth century. There were scales for weighing wool in the basement. De Potter, Gent, 2:104–7. White (witte) and blue (blauwe) wool textiles were varieties of cheaper grades of fabric, known as “sayes” or “worsted” in English. De Poerck, Draperie médiévale, 1:227; Munro, “Urban Regulation,” in Textiles, pp. 41, 46. SAG 301, 2, f. 28v, act no. 3, 14 July 1362. “Voert, so hebben de makeleeren gheconsentert dat de vrouwen zullen moghen vercoepen hare witte lakene ende haer blaeuwe, ende voert zullen de vrouwen moghen coepen 15 steene wullen ende niet daerboven . . .” De Pauw, Voorgeboden, p. 29. SAG 330, 1, f. 215.1, 21 Aug. 1360. Nicholas, Domestic Life, pp. 102–3. For borders and frontiers as bridges, see Certeau, Practice, pp. 126–8. De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 3:1. SAG 301, 1, f. 27r, act no. 3, 5 Sept. 1349: [“. . . so hebben wij scepenen . . . ghegheven en gheven der vors. Betten dat soet paisivelike en rustelijc moghe ghebruken alse langhe alse leven sal . . .”] SAG 301, 2, f. 28v, act no. 3, 14 July 1362: [“Kenlic sij etc. dat . . . scepenen van der keure in Ghend hebben ghegheven en gheven Betkine ende Kallekine Heinrics Gheilards kindren die hij hadde bij Mergriete Koens siin wijf was de zelve stede ende banc in de neder halle witte ende blaeuwe lakine up te vercoppene die Mergriete harer beeder moeder vors. uten ghiften van scepenen die doe waren haudende was. Ende dese banc zal van der vors. kindre weghe ghevoedt ende ghemainteniert moeten zijn ghelijc datter toe behoert.”] De Pauw and Vuylsteke, Rekeningen, 2:390–1, 288, 388, 441, 468–9, 484, and Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, pp. 99, 103, 149, 297. See also SAG 330, 1, f. 48r, act no. 1, 1 Feb. 1350. De Pauw, Voorgeboden, p. 131. Cf. Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 73. SAG 330, 1, f. 14v, act no. 4, 14 June 1344; f. 19r, act nos. 2 and 3, 27 Oct. 1345. SAG 330, 1, f. 225v, act no. 2, 19 Dec. 1360: [“. . . Kateline van den Wale Staes wedewe van den Bossche svollers heeft verkend ende verlijt dat soe es sculdich wel ende redelike goeder gherechter scult up hare ende up al thare . . . Jonfr. Alijssen Monds ende Simoen den Vaudere XXIX ½ guldine van goeder coopmanscepen van wullen die Staes haer man was ende

9780230104952_10_not.indd 195

2/9/2011 12:36:55 PM

196

NOTES

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

soe jegen hemlieden cochten.”] Another example is SAG 301, 1, f. 117v, act no. 1, 1353. Van Werveke, Stadsrekeningen, p. 150. Stabel, “Women at Market,” in Secretum Scriptorum, p. 261. SAG, series 156, no. 1, f. 20r, June 1360; transcribed by Marc Boone. E. Van der Hellen, “Het Gentse meerseniersambacht (1305–1540),” Handelingen der maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent 31 (1977): 77–149. SAG 330, 1, f. 223v, act no. 3, 5 Dec. 1360. De Potter, Gent, 6: 555. SAG 330, 1, f. 166r, act no. 3, 19 Dec. 1357; f. 162v, act no. 2, 13 Dec. 1357; and f. 170v-171r, 5 Jan. 1358. Boendale, Der leken spieghel, Book 25.

6 The Changing Fortunes of the Burgher and Patrimonial Constructions 1. See Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 80–6, among others. 2. Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy, pp. 70–94, 124–51; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, “Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the ‘Industrious Revolution’, c. 1600–1800,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 237–66; Danielle van den Heuvel, “Partners in Marriage and Business? Guilds and the Family Economy in Urban Food Markets in the Dutch Republic,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 217–36; Jan De Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 598–9. 3. Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 82–8; Erler and Kowaleski, “Introduction,” and McNamara, “Women and Power,” in Gendering the Master Narrative, pp. 4, 21; Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 169–95; Thomas Kuehn, “Person and Gender in the Laws,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Longman, 1998), p. 92 [87–106]. 4. Espinas and Pirenne, Recueil, n. 405, p. 386, n. 410, p. 398, n. 411, pp. 398–9, n. 414, pp. 401–2. [Hereafter EP]. 5. “No bien amée Verghine del Merre, bourgoise de Gand,” EP, n. 411, pp. 398–9; the original is a chirograph in the State Archives in Ghent, fonds Vlaanderen. 6. [“. . . Ic Mergriete van Eeke, beghine, claghe hu, Heren, over den onderbailliu die hiet Michiel . . . dat dese vors. persone mi namen een lanc wit laken, dwelke laken ic adde ghesent een minen vrient te Antwarpen die ghecocht soude ebben, maer het was hem te diere . . . ende sende mi dat selve laken weder bi Betten Smeesters, ende die Bette moeste bliven omme hare coemanscepe, ende sende dat vors. laken tote Ghent

9780230104952_10_not.indd 196

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

NOTES

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

197

me and[ren] strijpten lakenen. Ic Mergriete ende Bette vors. ne waren niet t[er stede als d]at vors. laken quam te Ghent up de Vrindachmarct, ende [s]loeghen dese vors. personne an dit laken hare hande ende wilden segghen dat buten ghemaect ware. . . . Ghi, Heren, ic vermete mi wel te proevene an wevers ende an volres dat dit laken was ghemaect, ghewevt ende ghevolt binnen Ghent. . . . Ende ic biddu, hu Heren, om Gode, dat u mijns ontfaerme ende ghi dit so nerensteleke besouct waerbi dat ics te bet hebbe beded ic ebber langhe tijt omme ghevolghet.”] EP, n. 414, pp. 401–402. The brackets and abbreviations in the Dutch text were placed by Pirenne and Espinas, but the brackets in the translation are mine. Espinas and Pirenne transcribed four chirographs with women principals in the Ghent section of their collection. There are very few charters with non-noble women surviving in the State Archives in Ghent (Rijksarchief te Gent), fonds Vlaanderen. EP, n. 405, p. 386. One of the other names may also be female. Meijers, Oost-Vlaamsche erfrecht, p. 16; Heirbaut, “Weduwen, erfgenamen en lenen,” 9–11; Godding, Le Droit privé, #478, p. 268, #585, p. 333. [“9. Item pater non poterit forisfacere domum vel rem filiorum, quae eis ex parte matris contingit, nec filii poterunt forisfacere rem vel domum patris quae ex parte patris venit.”] Philippe d’Alsace, “Ordinance du comte sur les pouvoirs des baillis en Flandre, vers 1178,” Coutume Gand, “Origines,” p. 390 [389–91]. Heirbaut, “Weduwen, erfgenamen en lenen,” 9; Warlop, Flemish Nobility, p. 29. Heirbaut, “Weduwen, ergenamen en lenen,” 11, 15; Godding, Le Droit privé, #515, p. 291. Studies of Champagne, Blois, Chartres, and other areas show that in practice, French noblewomen did inherit land and fiefs from their natal families. Future research may reveal that the same was true of Flanders. Ghent and Bruges sources always identified noblewomen by the names of their natal families rather than by their husbands’ names, in contrast to practice in the early modern era. Frederik Buylaert, “Eeuwen van ambitie: Edelen, steden en social mobiliteit in laatmiddeleeuwse Vlaanderen” (Ph.D. diss., Ghent University, 2008), p. 48. Dumolyn, “Vlaamse adel,” in Elites nobiliaires, p. 27; Warlop, Flemish Nobility, pp. 284–92. Among other examples, see SAG 301, 1, f. 139v, act no. 2, 27 July 1354, and f. 153v, act no. 3, 7 Oct. 1357. Blockmans, Stadspatriciaat, pp. 341–53. Buylaert calculated that the political involvement of nobles in urban networks, especially in Ghent, increased from 12 percent in 1350–75 to 44 percent in 1476–1500, as the result of ennoblement of burghers and urbanization of noble families. Buylaert, “Eeuwen van ambitie,” 47–59. In the ten years from 1380 to 1389, 51 percent of the orphans whose property is listed in the annual registers of the aldermen of the Gedele possessed immovable property from outside Ghent and 66 percent possessed

9780230104952_10_not.indd 197

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

198

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

NOTES

immovable property inside the city. Twenty-one percent of land was held in fief. Liliane Wynant, “Peiling naar de vermogensstruktuur te Gent op basis van de staten van goed, 1380–1389,” in Studien betreffende de sociale strukturen, pp. 50, 78–82 [47–138]. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 370–84; Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, pp. 174–83, and Marriage Exchange, pp. 182–95; Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 74–85; Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 116–7, 126–9; Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 12, 139. See also Nicholas’s comparison of the numbers of acts with women for all years through 1390, Domestic Life, p. 72. [“. . . als wettelic machtech in de stede van hare man . . .”] SAG 301, no. 26:1, f. 20r, act no. 3, 23 Nov. 1420. Other examples are: f. 13r, act no. 11, 17 Oct. 1420; f. 13v, act no. 9, 22 Oct. 1420; f. 14r, act no. 6, 16 Oct. 1420; and f. 17r, act no. 14, 15 Nov. 1420. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 370–84; Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, pp. 174–83, and Marriage Exchange, pp. 182–95; Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 102–106, 116–7, 126–9; Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, pp. 90–3; Ogilvie, Bitter Living, pp. 12, 139; Hanawalt, “Introduction,” in Women and Work, pp. xv–xvii. Jan De Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (1994), 261–2 [294–70]; Van Nederveen Meerkerk, “Couples Cooperating,” 237–8, 261–3; Van den Heuvel, “Partners in Marriage,” 228. Danneel, Weduwen en wezen, pp. 339–40. Gilissen, “Statut,” in La Femme, p. 320; Greilsammer, L’Envers du tableau, pp. 16–28. Kuehn, “Person and Gender,” and Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “Women and Work in Renaissance Italy,” in Gender and Society, pp. 93, 114–5, 125–6 [107–26]; David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 154–60; Kittell, “Testaments,” in Frau, pp. 47–82; Guzzetti, “Women’s Inheritance,” in Texture of Society, pp. 79–108. Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, pp. 155–7; Cohn, “Women and Work,” in Gender and Society, p. 112. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, pp. 86, 325–7. W. P. Blockmans, “Vlaanderen 1384–1482,” in AGN, 4:201–23; Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, pp. 227–31, 243. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, pp. 317–9; Blockmans, “Vlaanderen,” in AGN, 4:201–23; Jan Dumolyn, Staatsvorming en vorstelijke ambtenaren in het graafschap Vlaanderen (1419–1477), Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries, no. 14 (Antwerp-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2003), pp. 158–65; Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good: State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477–1482), Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800), no. 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).

9780230104952_10_not.indd 198

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

NOTES

199

30. Dumolyn and Haemers, “Patterns of Urban Rebellion,” 369–3; Verbruggen, Geweld, pp. 168–9. 31. To compare with constrictions of women’s work after the twentieth-century world wars, see Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1997), pp. 234–41. 32. Wiesner, Women and Gender, p. 299. 33. Haemers, For the Common Good; Dumolyn, “Nobles, Patricians and Officers,” 431–52. 34. Pleij, “Inleiding,” in Op belofte, pp. 34–5. 35. Howell, “Land to Love,” 216, 241–2. 36. Martha C. Howell, “The Gender of Europe’s Commercial Economy, 1200–1700,” Gender and History 20 (2008): 532 [519–538]; Howell, “Land to Love,” 232. 37. Raymond Van Uytven, “Showing Off One’s Rank in the Middle Ages,” in Showing Status: Representations of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Wim Blockmans and Antheun Janse (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 21 [19–34]. 38. Boone, Gent, pp. 19–23; Van Houtte and Van Uytven, “Nijverheid,” in AGN, 4:91–2, 101–8. 39. Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 182–3. 40. Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 208–17; Stabel, “Guilds,” 193. 41. Wijsdommen van dekenen; SAG, series 156, no. 1, f. 46, 18 Dec. 1402. Transcribed by Marc Boone. 42. [“. . . zij haerlieder quantiteyt van coste ende laste metten vors. ambachte moeten helpen draghen met haren live ende met haren goede alst van noede es. . . .”] SAG 156, no. 1, f. 46. 43. Women did not serve in the militia, but they did pay fees to the guild. Stabel, “Guilds,” 193. 44. [“. . . zij groetelic veronrecht souden wesen up dat haerlieder ghetrouwede wijfs of vrye wedewen niet en souden moghen staen werken ter cupen ende sien te haren goede. . . . zij en hebben gheploghen van ouden tiden te werkene ende te siene te haren goede . . . .”] SAG 156, no. 1, f. 46. 45. [“. . . dat van nu voert meer negheens blaeuwers wijf no ander wijf en sal staen werken ter cupen in de stede van eenen vryen cnape, ghemerct dat manneweerc es . . .”] SAG 156, no. 1, f. 46. 46. [“. . . behouden dien dat elke vrouwe mach helpen haer goed werken ende daer toesien alsoe dicwile alst hare ghelieven sal. . . .”] SAG 156, no. 1, f. 46. 47. Cf. Merry E. Wiesner, “Having Her Own Smoke: Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750,” in Singlewomen, 206 [192–216]. 48. Stabel, “Women at the Market,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 268–9.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 199

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

200

NOTES

49. Boone, “Geldhandel,” 789. 50. A few widows paid fees to the guild. Van der Hellen, “Meerseniersambacht,” 114–37. 51. See also Ogilvie, Bitter Living, pp. 60–3; Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past,” and Wiesner, “Having Her Own Smoke,” in Singlewomen, pp. 13, 16, 198–9. 52. In the late fifteenth century, 15 percent of those who sold cloth to the city were women. Five huge sales were made by recently made widows completing their late husbands’ contracts, but otherwise the value of the cloth sold by women was about one-third of the average of men’s sales. Boone, Gent, p. 107. 53. Approximately 50 percent of the buyers of hereditary and liferent annuities were widows, who were also 33 percent of the sellers. Boone, Dumon, and Reusens, Immobiliënmarkt, pp. 230–2. For comparison with the fourteenth century, see Figures 3.4 and 3.5. In the 1339–60 annuity acts, 37 percent of women buyers and sellers were single, 29 percent had no marital status given, and only 17 percent were widows. 54. Boone, Dumon, and Reusens, Immobiliënmarkt, pp. 230–2. They include women who were not identified by any marital status or the name of a male relative in the category of single women. 55. Hanawalt, “Introduction,” in Women and Work, p. xi; Ogilvie, Bitter Living, pp. 205–7. 56. Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 144–5, 151–2. 57. Peter Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction,” and Haren, “Confession, Social Ethics and Social Discipline,” in Handling Sin, 14 [3–33], 109–22, 156–63; Geneviève Hasenohr, “Religious Reading amongst the Laity in France in the Fifteenth Century,” Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, no. 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 206–9 [205–21]. 58. Prevenier, “Violence against Women,” in Medieval Crime, pp. 186–203; Myriam Greilsammer, “Rapts de séduction et rapts violents en Flandre et en Brabant à la fin du moyen-âge,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 66 (1988): 49–84. 59. Boendale, Der leken spieghel; Pleij, “Inleiding,” in Op belofte, pp. 8–52. 60. Kittell, “Reconciliation,” in Texture of Society, p. 16. 61. Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 26–9, and “Having Her Own Smoke,” in Singlewomen, pp. 198–9. 62. Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 112–121. 63. “In una loco sub una clausura,” Simons, Cities of Ladies, p. 113. 64. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 133–5; Galloway, “Discreet and Devout Maidens,” in Medieval Women, p. 102. 65. Howell, “Land to Love,” 216–53. 66. Mariann Naessens, “Judicial Authorities’ Views of Women’s Roles in Late Medieval Flanders,” in Texture of Society, 52–3 [51–77]; Herman Pleij,

9780230104952_10_not.indd 200

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

NOTES

67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

201

De sneeuwpoppen van 1511: Literatuur en stadscultuur tussen middeleeuwen en moderne tijd (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1988), pp. 259-–. Naessens, “Judicial Authorities’ Views,” in Texture of Society, p. 70. Herman Pleij, “Taakverdeling in het huwelijk: Over literatuur en social werkelijkheid in de late middeleeuwen,” Literatuur: Tijdschrift over nederlandse letterkunde 3 (1986): 66–76. Weisner, Women and Gender, 102–6; Eric Bousmar, “Neither Equality nor Radical Oppression: The Elasticity of Women’s Roles in the Late Medieval Low Countries,” in Texture of Society, 117 [109–27]. Howell, “Gender,” and other works; Pleij, “Taakverdeling”; Weisner, Working Women, Ogilvie, Bitter Living; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” Chap. 5 in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124–51; Kowaleski, “Women’s Work,” in Women and Work, and many others. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, pp. 309–17; Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past,” and Wiesner, “Having Her Own Smoke,” in Singlewomen, pp. 15–8, 196–9. No surviving privilege or ordinance of the city of Ghent before 1419 contains a statement that husbands controlled community property or a wife’s personal property. However, I do not doubt that the principle of the husband’s control over his wife was an integral part of oral custom and the burgher construction. For more about this issue, see Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 78, 288. Coutume Gand, Origines de la coutume de la ville de Gand, no. 64, pp. 593–8: [“. . . Raesse van den Wale als wettelic vooght van joncfrauwe Katelinen Stoppelaren zinen wive, wylen ‘s voirseits Willems dochtre . . .”] Coutume Gand, p. 594: [“. . . want so uten lande ware ende vervreemt van den vorseiden Raessen . . .”] Coutume Gand, 595: [“. . . segghende dat hy vooght ware van sinen voirseiden wive, ende . . . dat hy mids dien wel machtich was ghenacten te eesschene, want, alwaer ‘t dat zoe voer hoghen ware, nochtan soude zo moeten by hem daer toe gheauctoriseert wesen, ende mids dien dat haer de auctoriteit van hem commen zoude te wette te sprekene, up dat zo voor hoghen ware . . . .”] Coutume Gand, 596: [“. . . hy als hooft, vooght ende man wel ontfanghelic es . . .”] Coutume Gand, 595: [“. . . dat zo by gheenre redeliker cause, nemaer by haren quaden wille ende niet anders, van hem vervremt es . . .”] Coutume Gand, 596: [“. . . want by dusdanen weghe souden of mochten vele vrauwen die scoone versterften voer hoghen hebben, up hopen van dien, hem ontvremden van haren gheselscepe, ende dat versteken van den ghenen daer t’ andeelich an zoude wesen metten rechte; t’welke eene zake ware van quaden exemple, ieghen redene ende recht. . . .”] Coutume Gand, 597: [“. . . na vele deliberacien . . .”] The Collatie or the Great Council (Grote Raad) of Ghent was composed of the “notables,” the major representatives of the Three Members, the patricians [poorterij],

9780230104952_10_not.indd 201

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

202

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

NOTES

the weavers’ guild [weverij] and the small guilds [kleine neringen]. Boone, Gent, pp. 28–33. Reference from Coutume Gand, 598: “Roodenboek van schepenen van gedeele, f. 44r; SAG, inventaire imprimé, n. 522, reg. C, f. 56v.” Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 338–44. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 340–1, 344. [“. . . uutghedaen openbaere coopvrauwen, huerlieder coopmanschepe angaende ende anderssins niet . . .”] Coutume Gand, rubric XX, no. 2, p. 86. [“. . . zonder expres consent ende authoriteyt van hueren man . . .”] Coutume Gand, rubric XX, no. 18, p. 92. This “Velléien” provision, incorporated into the 1563 homologous custom, was one of the first direct importations from Roman law. Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 79; Gilissen, “Le Statut,” in La Femme, pp. 274–7; Coutume Homologuée, rubric XVII, no. 4, p. 74. See the discussion in the volume, Carlier and Soens, ed., Household in Late Medieval Cities, especially Godding, “La Famille,” pp. 25–36; Manlio Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000–1800, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 36–9. Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 281–312. SAG 301, 1, f. 125r-126v, 28 Feb. 1354. Danneel, Weduwen, pp. 26–55. SAG 301, 1, f. 58v, act no. 2, 5 Mar. 1350: [“Kenlic zij etc. dat Jacob Trijl heift vercocht ende ghecreghen wel ende wettelike jeghen Janne Trijle sinen broeder ende jeghen Joncvr. Lijsbetten sinen wettelike wive dat land dat hier naer bescreven staet . . . ende dit omme eene zeker summe van ghelde van der welker her Jan ende Joncvr. Lijsbette vors. hilden betaelt, ghemoed ende al ghenouch ghedaen van Jacop vors. Mids desen se ghinghen Jan ende Joncvr. Lisbete vors. huute van de vors. lande . . . . Ende Joncvr. Lijsbette vors. heift quite ghescolden bi consente van Janne Trijle haren wettelike man ende vocht, alle de bilevinghe ende recht dat so namaels hebben mochte an dit vors. land. Ende ware so sake dat Jan ofte Joncvr. Lijsbette vors. hier jeghen yet daden of ghinghen omme Jacob vors. onghebruuc te doene van desen vors. lande ende hem niet en heten ghebruken alse siin proper coepgoed, dat ware up eene wettelike scult van vijf hondert ponden par.”] Heirbaut, “Weduwen, erfgenamen en lenen,” 18–21; Godding, Le Droit privé, 311–2, 318; Meijers, Oost-Vlaamsche erfrecht, 32–3. Kittell, “Guardianship,” 904. SAG 301, 1, f. 214r, act no. 1, 27 Sep. 1360; f. 214r, act no. 2, 9 Dec. 1360. “. . . hare wetteleke manne ende voghede . . .” SAG 301, 1, f. 214r, act no. 2, 9 Dec. 1360. See SAG 301, 1, f. 120r, act no. 2, 5 Feb. 1354; f. 212v, act no. 1, 19 Sep. 1360. SAG 301, 1, f. 137v, act no. 2, 18 July 1354.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 202

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

NOTES

203

Conclusion 1. However, the same inheritance and marital community property system, the community limited to movables and acquisitions, applied throughout East Flanders. Godding, Le Droit privé, #486–7, pp. 273–5 and map, p. 569. 2. Godding, Le Droit privé, pp. 78–9; Van Gerven, “Vrouwen, arbeid,” 947–50. 3. Farmer, “Luxury Cloth Industries”; Stabler, “Now She Is Mary,” 115–64. 4. Murray, Bruges, pp. 309–21. 5. Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 72, 76; Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, pp. 62, 164; Kloek, “Vrouwenarbeid,” 373–402. Women also comprised half of the weavers who sold cloth to a Bruges draper in the 1360s. Murray, Bruges, pp. 308, 322. 6. Kittell and Queller, “Whether,” 67, 72–4. 7. Kittell, “Construction,” 215–27. 8. Murray, Bruges, p. 308. 9. Howell, Marriage Exchange, pp. 196–228. 10. In Marseille, women owned one-quarter of the property inside the city and almost one-third of the property outside the city walls in the fourteenth century. Women were also “noticeably active and visible in public life: as retailers, lenders, borrowers, agricultural laborers, businesswomen,” and appeared in 27 percent of the lawsuits. Smail, Consumption of Justice, p. 44. In the 1292 tax assessment records from Paris, 2,238 households were headed by women, and 193 of these women were identified by the names of their husbands. For the remaining 2,045 women, no marital status or husband’s name is given as an identifier, leading David Herlihy to conclude that “marital status of women seems not to have mattered much to the assessors.” Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, p. 134. 11. R. C. Van Caenegem, “Law in the Medieval World,” in Legal History: A European Perspective (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1991), 117–9 [115–48]. 12. Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 18–30; Ruiz, “Women, Work and Daily Life in Late Medieval Castile,” and Vaquero, “Women in the Chartularies of Toledo,” in Women at Work in Spain, pp. 101–20, 121–46; Reyerson, “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier,” in Women and Work, pp. 117–44; Wensky, Women’s Guilds in Cologne,” 631–50; Kelleher, Measure of Woman. 13. Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray, ed., Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800) (New York: Routledge, 2010). 14. Epstein, Wage Labor, pp. 210–5. 15. Of the 491 women who acted in their own names, there were 63 single and 81 married women, for a total of 144, or 29 percent of the total. There were 109 widows, or 22 percent of the total. See Figure 2.4.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 203

2/9/2011 12:36:56 PM

204

NOTES

16. A good recent example is Beattie, Medieval Single Women. 17. Ellen Kittell’s analysis of the collection of surviving chirographs from Douai between 1200 and 1384 showed that among the 612 women who were “clearly active,” 60 percent were not identified by marital status or by the names of male relatives. Kittell, “Construction,” 216–7. 18. For the more standard gender construction elsewhere in Europe: see Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters, p. 7; Wiesner, Women and Gender, p. 105; Ward, Women, pp. 84–93; Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, pp. 158–9; Epstein, Wage Labor, pp. 94–5, 210–5; Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale,” in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 11–25 [11–38]; Monica Chojnacka, “Singlewomen in Early Modern Venice: Communities and Opportunities,” in Singlewomen, 221–2 [217–35]; Heide Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 74–6; Ogilvie, Bitter Living, pp. 9–11. 19. For an early modern contrast, see Froide, Never Married, 15–43, and Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 60–3. 20. Amy Froide, “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England,” in Singlewomen, pp. 237–41 [236–69]; Wunder, He Is the Sun, pp. 87, 128; Wiesner, “Having Her Own Smoke,” in Singlewomen, pp. 199–200. 21. Throughout the southern Netherlands, legal changes in and after the sixteenth century tended to reduce the legal capacity of women, Godding, Le Droit privé, p. 78; Howell, Marriage Exchange; Linda Guzzetti, “Women’s Inheritance,” in Texture of Society, p. 83. However, many historians argue that the legal and economic positions of women were better in the Netherlands than in other areas of Europe in the early modern period. De Vries and Van Der Woude, First Modern Economy, 598–9; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Collins, 1987), pp. 402–4; Van Nederveen Meerkerk, “Couples Cooperating,” 261. 22. Wiesner, Women and Gender, pp. 38–9. 23. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters, p. 7. 24. I am indebted to Michele Clouse for this image. 25. Women were drapers in sixteenth-century Leiden; marketsellers in early modern Amsterdam; and milliners, mantua makers, and shopkeepers in eighteenth-century England, just to give a few examples. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, p. 71; Van Den Heuvel, “Partners in Marriage,” 217–36; Froide, Never Married, p. 91. 26. In contrast, see Miri Rubin, “The Languages of Late-Medieval Feminism,” in Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 37–9 [34–49], among many others.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 204

2/9/2011 12:36:57 PM

NOTES

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

205

Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 50–87 and 103–4. Stabler, “Now She Is Mary,” 115–64. Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 132–5. Women comprised 25 percent of the membership of the Bruges minaturists guild (St. John the Baptist guild) in 1480. There are no similar figures for Ghent, but there is anecdotal evidence of two painters and miniaturists in the fifteenth century, Agnes Van den Bossche and Clara De Keysere. De Hemptinne, “Femme Copistes,” in Secretum Scriptorum, pp. 136–7. Pearson, Envisioning Gender, pp. 27. Eichberger, Women of Distinction; Wilson, Painting in Bruges; Honig, Painting and the Market; Laura D. Gelfand, “Regency, Power, and Dynastic Visual Memory: Margaret of Austria as Patron and Propagandist,” in Texture of Society, pp. 203–25. Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple, “The Power of Women Through the Family in Medieval Europe, 500–1100,” Feminist Studies I (1973): 126–42, reprinted in revised form in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 83 [83–101]; LoPrete and Evergates, “Introduction,” and Karen Nicholas, “Countesses,” in Aristocratic Women, pp. 1–5, 111–37; Kimberly A. LoPrete, “The Gender of Lordly Women: The Case of Adela of Blois,” in Pawns or Players? Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women, ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 90–110. Amy Livingstone, “Aristocratic Women in the Chartrain,” and Theodore Evergates, “Aristocratic Women in the County of Champagne,” in Aristocratic Women, pp. 44–73, 74–110. Livingstone, “Aristocratic Women in the Chartrain,” pp. 71–3. In her analysis of more than 3,000 wills enrolled at London’s Husting Court (1300–1500), Kate Kelsey Staples found that 78 percent of mentioned daughters received some real property, in comparison to 86 percent of sons. Sons were more likely to receive land than daughters were, but only by a small margin. Kate Kelsey Staples, “Inheritance in Late Medieval London: Challenging a Dualistic Gender Construct” (paper presented at 14th Berkshire Conference of Women’s History, Minneapolis, June 2008). Many Venetian fathers gave their daughters bequests of property, knowing that by the ius proprium of Venice, those daughters could legally perform management of that property, whatever their marital status, and without a guardian. Guzzetti, “Women’s Inheritance,” in Texture of Society, pp. 97–8; Stanley Chojnacki, “Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, pp. 78–9 [63–86]. McNamara and Wemple, “Power of Women,” in Women and Power, p. 83.

9780230104952_10_not.indd 205

2/9/2011 12:36:57 PM

9780230104952_10_not.indd 206

2/9/2011 12:36:57 PM

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Primary Sources Cartulary of the Beguinage of St. Elizabeth (Sint-Elizabethbegijnhof ). Rijksarchief Gent (State Archives of Ghent), Fonds Sint-Baaf/Bisdom Gent, Series E. Guild Deacons. Wijsdommen van dekenen ( Judgments of Guild Deacons). Stadsarchief Gent, Series 156. Transcribed by Marc Boone. Schepenen van de Gedele. Jaarregisters. Stadsarchief Gent (Aldermen of the Gedele. Annual Registers. City Archive of Ghent), Series 330, nos. 1, 11, and 2. Schepenen van de Keure. Jaarregisters. Stadsarchief Gent (Aldermen of the Keure. Annual Registers. City Archive of Ghent), Series 301, no. 1, 26.

Archival Guides Boon, J. Regesten op de jaarregisters van de schepenen van de keure te Gent. 2 vols. Ghent-Leuven: Belgisch centrum voor landelijke geschiedenis, no. 8, 1968. Vannieuwenhuyse, Johan. Regesten op de Jaarregisters van de keure: Schepenjaar 1360–1361. Ghent: Stad Gent, 1981.

Printed Primary Sources Boendale, Jan van (De Clerc). Der leken spieghel, leerdicht van den jare 1330, door Jan Boendale, gezegd Jan de Clerc, schepenklerk te Antwerpen. Edited by M. de Vries. 3 vols. Leiden: Werken uitgegeven door de vereeniging ter bevordering der oude Nederlansche letterkunde, 1844–1848. De Pauw, Napoléon, ed. Cartulaire historique et généalogique des Artevelde. Brussels: Hayez, 1920. ———. De Voorgeboden der stad Gent in de XIVe eeuw (1337–1382). Ghent: C. Annoot Braeckman, Ad. Hoste: 1885. De Pauw, Napoléon, and Julius Vuylsteke, eds. De Rekeningen der Stad Gent. Tijdvak van Jacob van Artevelde 1339–1349. 3 vols. Maatschappij van Nederlandsche letterkunde en geschiedenis. Ghent: Ad. Hoste, 1874–1885. De Smet, Andries, and Antonis De Roovere, Excellente Chronike van Vlaenderen. In “Un Texte inédit de la Chronique de Flandre concernant Artevelde.” Bulletin de la commission royale d’histoire 82 (1913): 323–367.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 207

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

208

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Espinas, Georges, and Henri Pirenne, eds. Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre. Première partie: des origines à l’époque bourguignonne. Vol. 2. Brussels: P. Imbreghts, 1909. Froissart, Jean. Chroniques. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1869–1975. Gessler, J., ed. Het Brugsche livre des mestiers en zijn navolgingen. Bruges: Consortium van Brugsche drukkers, 1931. Gheldolf, A. E., A. Du Bois, and L. De Hondt, eds. Coutume de la ville de Gand. Vols. 1 and 2 of Coutumes des pays et comté du Flandre. Quartier de Gand. Commission royale pour la publication des anciennes lois et ordonnances de la Belgique. Brussels: G. Gobbaerts, 1868–1887. Van Werveke, Alfons, ed. Gentse Stads- en Baljuwsrekeningen (1351–1364). Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1970. Wielant, Filips. Filips Wielant Verzameld Werk, edited by Jos Monballyu. 2 vols. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1995.

Secondary Sources Aerts, Erik, and John H. Munro, eds. Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History. Proceedings of the Tenth International Economic History Congress: Session B-15. Leuven: Leuven History Press, 1990. Angelos, Mark. “Women in Genoese Commenda Contracts, 1155–1216.” Journal of Medieval History 20 (1994): 299–312. Arnade, Peter. Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Arnade, Peter, Martha Howell, and Walter Simons. “Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (2002): 515–548. Asmussen, Georg. Die Lübecker Flandernfahrer in der zweiten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (1358–1408). Kieler Werkstücke. Reihe D. Beiträge zur europäischen Geschichte des späten Mittelalters 0936-4161, Hansekauf leute in Brügge, vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. Bardsley, Sandy. “Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England.” Past and Present 165 (1999): 3–29. ———. Women’s Roles in the Middle Ages. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Barron, Caroline M. “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London.” Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989): 35–58. Baum, Hans-Peter. “Annuities in Late Medieval Hanse Towns.” The Business History Review 59, no. 1 (1985): 24–48. Beattie, Cordelia. Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Bellomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000–1800. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Bennett, Judith M. Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 208

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

209

———. “The Village Ale-Wife: Women and Brewing in Fourteenth-Century England.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 20–36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Bennett, Judith M., Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl, eds. Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Bennett, Judith M. and Amy M. Froide, eds. Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. “A Singular Past.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 1–37. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Billen, Claire. “Le Marché urbain: Un Espace de liberté pour les femmes rurales?” In La Ville et les femmes en Belgique: Histoire et sociologie: Actes de la journée d’étude organisée le 12 février 1993 par les facultés universitaires Saint-Louis et le groupe interdisciplinaire d’études sur les femmes de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, edited by Éliane Gubin and Jean-Pierre Nandrin, 41–56. Brussels: Publications des facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1993. Biller, Peter. “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction.” In Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, 3–33. York: York Medieval Press, 1998. Biller, Peter, and A. J. Minnis, eds. Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages. York: York Medieval Press, 1998. Blockmans, F. Het Gentsche stadspatriciaat tot omstreeks 1302. Rijksuniversiteit te Gent werken uitgegeven door de faculteit van de wijsbegeerte en letteren, 85. Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1938. Blockmans, F. and W. P. Blockmans. “Devaluation, Coinage and Seignorage under Louis de Nevers and Louis de Male, Counts of Flanders, 1330–84.” In Coinage in the Low Countries (880–1500): The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, edited by N. J. Mayhew, 69–94. BAR International Series, 54. Oxford: B.A.R., 1979. Blockmans, W. Een middeleeuwse vendetta: Gent 1300 (Houten, Neth.: De Haan, 1987). ———. “Peilingen naar de sociale strukturen te Gent tijdens de late 15e eeuw.” Studiën betreffende de sociale strukturen te Brugge, Kortrijk en Gent in de 14e en 15e eeuw, edited by W. Blockmans, I. De Meyer, J. Mertens, C. Pauwelyn and W. Vanderpijpen, 215–62. Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 139, Standen en Landen, no. 65. Ghent, U.G.A., 1971. Blockmans, W. P. “The Social and Economic Effects of Plague in the Low Countries: 1349–1500.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 58, no. 3 (1980): 833–863. ———. “Vlaanderen 1384–1482.” In Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 201– 223. Vol. 4. Haarlem: Fibula-van Dishoeck, 1980. Blockmans, W. P., G. Pieters, W. Prevenier, and R. W. M. van Schaik. “Tussen crisis en welvaart: Sociale veranderingen 1300–1500.” In Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 42–86. Vol. 4. Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1980.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 209

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

210

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Blockmans, Wim, Marc Boone, and Thérèse De Hemptinne, eds. Secretum Scriptorum: Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1999. Blondé, Bruno, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme, eds. Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800), 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Boone, Marc. “Geldhandel en pandbedrijf in Gent tijdens de Bourgondische period: Politieke, fiscal en sociale aspecten.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire/ Belgisch tijdschrift voor filologie et geschiedenis 66, no. 4 (1988): 767–791. ———. Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen ca. 1384–ca. 1453. Een sociaal-politieke studie van een staatsvormingproces. Verhandelingen van de koninklijke academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunsten van België, no. 133. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1990. ———. “L’Industrie textile à Gand au bas moyen âge ou les resurrections successives d’une activité réputée moribonde.” In La Draperie ancienne des Pays-Bas: Débouchés et stratégies de survie (14e–16e siècles): Actes du colloque tenu à Gand le 28 avril 1992/Drapery Production in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Markets and Strategies for Survival (14th–16th Centuries): Proceedings of the Colloquium Ghent, April 28th 1992, edited by Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier, 15–62. LeuvenApeldoorn: Garant, 1993. ———. “Les Métiers dans les villes f lamandes au bas moyen âge (XIVe – XVIe siècles): Images normatives, réalités socio-politiques et économiques.” In Les Métiers au moyen âge: Aspects économiques et sociaux: Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la Neuve 7–9 octobre 1993, edited by Pascale Lambrechts and JeanPierre Sosson, 1–21. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1994. ———. “Openbare diensten en initiatieven te Gent tijdens de late Middeleeuwen (14de–15de eeuw).” In Het Openbaar initiatief van de gemeenten in België: Historische grondslagen (Ancien Régime): 11de Internationaal Colloquium, Spa, 1–4 Sept. 1982: Handelingen/L’Initiative publique des communes en Belgique: Fondements historiques (Ancien Régime): Actes Colloque international, Spa, 1–4 Sept. 1982, 74–114. Pro Civitate, no. 65. Brussels, Crédit communal de Belgique, 1984. ———. “Urban Space and Political Conf lict in Late Medieval Flanders.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002): 621–40. Boone, Marc, Karel Davids, and Paul Janssens, eds. Urban Public Debts: Urban Government and the Market for Annuities in Western Europe (14th–18th centuries). Studies in European Urban History, 1100–1800. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Marc Boone, Karel Davids, and Paul Janssens. “Urban Public Debts from the 14th to the 18th Century. A New Approach.” In Urban Public Debts: Urban Government and the Market for Annuities in Western Europe (14th–18th centuries), edited by Marc Boone, Karel Davids, and Paul Janssens, 3–12. Studies in European Urban History, 1100–1800. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Boone, Marc, Thérèse De Hemptinne, and Walter Prevenier. “Gender and Early Emancipation in the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period.” In Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jessica Munns and Penny Richards, 21–39. Harlow and London: Pearson Education Limited, 2003.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 210

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

211

Boone, Marc, Machteld Dumon, and Birgit Reusens. Immobiliënmarkt, fiscaliteit en sociale ongelijkheid te Gent, 1483–1503. Standen en Landen, vol. 78. KortrijkHeule: U.G.A., 1981. Boone, Marc, and M. Prak. “Rulers, Patricians, and Burghers: The Great and the Little Traditions of Urban Revolt in the Low Countries.” In A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, edited by K. Davids and J. Lucassen, 99–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Boone, Marc, and Walter Prevenier, eds. La Draperie ancienne des Pays-Bas: Débouchés et stratégies de survie (14e–16e siècles): Actes du colloque tenu à Gand le 28 avril 1992/Drapery Production in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Markets and Strategies for Survival (14th-16th Centuries): Proceedings of the Colloquium Ghent, April 28th 1992. Studies in the Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1993. Botticini, Maristella. “A Loveless Economy? Intergenerational Altruism and the Marriage Market in a Tuscan Town, 1415–1436.” Journal of Economic History 59 (1999): 104–121. Bousmar, Eric. “Du Marché aux bordiaulx: Hommes, femmes et rapports de sexe (gender) dans les villes des Pays-Bas au bas moyen âge: Etat de nos connaissances et perspectives de recherche.” In Hart en marge in de laat-middeleeuwse stedelijke maatschappij: Handelingen van het colloquium te Gent (22–23 augustus 1996)/Core and Periphery in Late Medieval Urban Society: Proceedings of the Colloquium at Ghent (22nd–23rd August 1996)/Coeur et marge dans la société urbaine au bas moyen âge: Actes du colloque tenu à Gand (22–23 août 1996), edited by Myriam Carlier, Anke Greve, Walter Prevenier, and Peter Stabel, 51–70. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 7. Leuven-Appeldoorn: Garant, 1997. ———. “Neither Equality nor Radical Oppression: The Elasticity of Women’s Roles in the Late Medieval Low Countries.” In The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam, 109–27. New Middle Ages, ed. Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Brown, Judith C. and Robert C. Davis, eds. Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy. Women and Men in History. London and New York: Longman, 1998. Buylaert, Frederik. “Eeuwen van ambitie: Edelen, steden en social mobiliteit in laatmiddeleeuwse Vlaanderen.” Ph.D. diss., Ghent University, 2008. Cadden, Joan. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Carlier, Myriam. Kinderen van de minne? Bastaarden in het vijfitende-eeuw Vlaanderen. Verhandelingen van de koninklijke vlaamse academie van België van wetenschappen en kunsten. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 2001. ———. “Paternity in Late Medieval Flanders.” In Secretum Scriptorum: Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier, edited by Wim Blockmans, Marc Boone, and Thérèse De Hemptinne, 235–258. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1999. ———. “Solidariteit of sociale controle? De rol van vrienden en magen en buren in een middeleeuwse stad.” In Hart en marge in de laat-middeleeuwse stedelijke

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 211

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

212

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

maatschappij: Handelingen van het colloquium te Gent (22–23 augustus 1996)/ Core and Periphery in Late Medieval Urban Society: Proceedings of the Colloquium at Ghent (22nd–23rd August 1996)/Coeur et marge dans la société urbaine au bas moyen âge: Actes du colloque tenu à Gand (22–23 août 1996), edited by Myriam Carlier, Anke Greve, Walter Prevenier, and Peter Stabel, 71–91. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 7. Leuven-Appeldoorn: Garant, 1997. Carlier, Myriam, Anke Greve, Walter Prevenier, and Peter Stabel, eds. Hart en marge in de laat-middeleeuwse stedelijke maatschappij: Handelingen van het colloquium te Gent (22–23 augustus 1996)/Core and Periphery in Late Medieval Urban Society: Proceedings of the Colloquium at Ghent (22nd–23rd August 1996)/Coeur et marge dans la société urbaine au bas moyen âge: Actes du colloque tenu à Gand (22–23 août 1996). Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 7. Leuven-Appeldoorn: Garant, 1997. Carlier, Myriam, and Tim Soens, eds. The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared: Proceedings of the International Conference Ghent 21st–22nd January 2000. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries, no. 12. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2001. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984. Chabot, Isabelle. “La loi du lignage: Notes sur le système successoral f lorentin.” Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 7 (1998): 51–72. Cheyette, Fredric. Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Chojnacka, Monica. “Singlewomen in Early Modern Venice: Communities and Opportunities.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 217–35. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Chojnacki, Stanley. “Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State.” In Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, 63–86. Women and Men in History. New York: Longman, 1998. ———. “Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice.” In Women in Medieval Society, edited by Susan M. Stuard, 173–98. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976. Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. “Women and Work in Renaissance Italy.” In Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, 107–26. London and New York: Longman, 1998. Chorley, Patrick. “The Cloth Exports of Flanders and Northern France During the Thirteenth Century: A Luxury Trade?” Economic History Review 40 (1987): 349–379. Collins, James. “The Economic Role of Women in Seventeenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 436–470.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 212

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

213

Crowston, Clare. “Women, Gender, and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research,” International Review of Social History 53 (2008): Supplement, 19–44. Danneel, Marianne. “Gender and the Life Course in the Late Medieval Flemish Town.” In Secretum Scriptorum: Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier, edited by Wim Blockmans, Marc Boone, and Thérèse De Hemptinne, 225–233. LeuvenApeldoorn: Garant, 1999. ———. “Quelques aspects du service domestique féminin à Gand d’après les registres et les manuels échevinaux des parchons (2ème moitié du XVème siècle.)” In Sociale structuren en topografie van armoede en rijkdom in de 14de en 15de eeuw. Methodologische aspecten en resultaten van recent onderzoek. Handelingen van het colloquium gehouden te Gent op 24 mei 1985, edited by W. Prevenier, R. Van Uytven, and E. van Cauwenberghe, 51–72. Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 267. Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1986. ———. Weduwen en wezen in het laat-middeleeuwse Gent. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 3. Leuven-Appeldoorn: Garant, 1995. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 167–197. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. ———. “Women on Top.” Chap. 5 in Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965, 1968, 1973, 1975. Decavele, Johan. “Bestuursinstellingen van de stad Gent (einde 11de eeuw–1795).” In De gewestelijke en lokale overheidsinstellingen in Vlaanderen tot 1795, edited by Walter Prevenier and Beatrijs Augustyn, 277-321. Algemeen Rijksarchief en Rijksarchieven in de Provinciën, Studia 72. Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 1997. De Hemptinne, Thérèse. “Des Femmes copistes dans les Pays-Bas au bas moyen âge (14e–15e siècle). Approche d’une activité féminine mal connue.” In Secretum Scriptorum: Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier, edited by Wim Blockmans, Marc Boone, and Thérèse De Hemptinne, 129–144. LeuvenApeldoorn: Garant, 1999. De Poerck, Guy. La Draperie médiévale en Flandre et en Artois: Technique et terminologie. 3 vols. Rijksuniversiteit te Gent werken uitgegeven door de faculteit van de wijsbegeerte en letteren, 110–112. Bruges: De Tempel, 1951. De Potter, Frans. Gent van de oudsten tijd tot heden: Geschiedkundige beschrijving der stad. 8 vols. Ghent: Familia et Patria Handzame, 1883; reprinted 1969. De Ridder-Symoens, Hilde. “Stad en kennis.” In Hart en marge in de laat-middeleeuwse stedelijke maatschappij: Handelingen van het colloquium te Gent (22–23 augustus 1996)/Core and Periphery in Late Medieval Urban Society: Proceedings of the Colloquium at Ghent (22nd–23rd August 1996)/Coeur et marge dans la société urbaine au bas moyen âge: Actes du colloque tenu à Gand (22–23 août 1996), edited by Myriam Carlier, Anke Greve, Walter Prevenier, and Peter Stabel, 131–52. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 7. Leuven-Appeldoorn: Garant, 1997.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 213

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

214

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

De Vries, Jan. “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution.” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (1994), 249–70. De Vries, Jan, and Ad Van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. De Win, Paul. “The Lesser Nobility of the Burgundian Netherlands.” In Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe, edited by Michael Jones, 95–118. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986. Duby, Georges. Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France. Translated by Elborg Forster. Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History, no. 11. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Dumolyn, Jan. “Nobles, Patricians and Officers: The Making of a National Political Elite in Late Medieval Flanders.” Journal of Social History 40 (2006), 431–52. ———. “Patriarchaal patrimonialisme. De vrouw als object in sociale transacties in het laatmiddeleeuwse Vlaanderen: familiale strategieën en gender posities.” Verslagen van het centrum voor genderstudies–UGent 12 (2003): 1–28. ———. Staatsvorming en vorstelijke ambtenaren in het graafschap Vlaanderen (1419– 1477). Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries, no. 14. Antwerp-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2003. ———. “De Vlaamse adel in de Late Middeleeuwen: Staatsdienst en sociale mobiliteit.” In Les Elites nobiliaires dans les Pays-Bas au seuil des temps modernes, 9–30. Centre de recherches en historie du droit et des institutions, cahier 16. Brussels: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2001. Dumolyn, Jan, and Jelle Haemers. “Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders.” Journal of Medieval History 31, no. 4 (2005): 369–393. Eichberger, Dagmar, ed. Women of Distinction: Margaret of York, Margaret of Austria. Turnhout, Brepols, 2005. Endrei, Walter. “Manufacturing a Piece of Woollen Cloth in Medieval Flanders: How Many Work Hours?” In Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History. Proceedings of the Tenth International Economic History Congress: Session B-15, edited by Erik Aerts and John H. Munro, 14–23. Leuven: Leuven History Press, 1990. Epstein, Steven A. Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Erler, Mary C., and Maryanne Kowaleski. “Introduction: A New Economy of Power Relations: Female Agency in the Middle Ages.” In Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 1–16. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2003. Erler, Mary C., and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. 2nd ed. New York: Free Press, 1997.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 214

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

215

Evergates, Theodore. “Aristocratic Women in the County of Champagne.” In Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, edited by Theodore Evergates, 74–110. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Evergates, Theodore, ed. Aristocratic Women in Medieval France. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Farmer, Sharon. “ ‘It Is Not Good That [Wo]man Should be Alone’: Elite Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 82–105. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. ———. “Women and the Luxury Cloth Industries of Paris.” Piggott-McCone Endowed Lecture delivered at Seattle University, May 12, 2005. Fernandez, Pablo. “Het verschijnsel kindermoord in de Nederlanden (XIVde– XVde eeuw.)” In Sociale structuren en topografie van armoede en rijkdom in de 14de en 15de eeuw. Methodologische aspecten en resultaten van recent onderzoek. Handelingen van het colloquium gehouden te Gent op 24 mei 1985, edited by W. Prevenier, R. Van Uytven, and E. Van Cauwenberghe, 111–133. Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 267. Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1986. Froide, Amy. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 236–69. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Fujii, Yoshio. “Draperie urbaine et draperie rurale dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux au bas moyen âge: Une mise au point des recherches après H. Pirenne.” Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990): 77–97. Galloway, Penelope. “ ‘Discreet and Devout Maidens’: Women’s Involvement in Beguine Communities in Northern France, 1200–1500.” In Medieval Women in their Communities, edited by Diane Watt, 92–116. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1997. Galvin, M. “Credit and Parochial Charity in Fifteenth-Century Bruges.” Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 131–54. Gelfand, Laura D. “Regency, Power, and Dynastic Visual Memory: Margaret of Austria as Patron and Propagandist,” in The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam, 203–225. New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Gilissen, John. La Coutume. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, fasc. 41. Turnhout: Brepols, 1982. ———. “Le Statut de la femme dans l’ancien droit belge.” In Recueil de la société Jean Bodin, 12: La Femme, 2, edited by André Gouthier, 255–321. Brussels: Editions de la librarie encyclopédique, 1962. Godding, Philippe. Le Droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux du 12e au 18e siècle. Académie Royale de Belgique, Mémoires de la classe des lettres, Collection in -4°, -2° série, vol. 14. Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1987.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 215

2/9/2011 12:37:41 PM

216

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Godding, Philippe. “La Famille dans le droit urbain de l’Europe du NordOuest au bas moyen-âge.” In The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared: Proceedings of the International Conference Ghent 21st–22nd January 2000, edited by Myriam Carlier and Tim Soens, 25–36. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries, No. 12. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2001. Goldberg, P. J. P. Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Greilsammer, Myriam. L’Envers du tableau: Mariage et maternité en Flandre médiévale. Paris: Armand Colin, 1990. ———. “Rapts de séduction et rapts violents en Flandre et en Brabant à la fin du moyen-âge.” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 66 (1988): 49–84. Guzzetti, Linda. “Dowries in Fourteenth-Century Venice.” Renaissance Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 430–473. ———. “Women’s Inheritance and Testamentary Practices in Late Fourteenthand Early Fifteenth-Century Venice and Ghent.” In The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam, 79–108. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2004. Haemers, Jelle. For the Common Good: State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477–1482). Studies in European Urban History (1100– 1800), no. 17. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. ———. De Gentse Opstand, 1449–53. De strijd tussen rivaliserende netwerken om het stedelijke kapitaal. Standen en Landen, no. 105. Kortrijk-Heule, Belg.: U.G.A., 2004. Hajnal, J. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.” In Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, 101–43. Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1965. Hanawalt, Barbara A. “Introduction.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt, vii–xviii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. ———. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. “Women and the Household Economy in the Preindustrial Period: An Assessment of Women, Work, and the Family.” Journal of Women’s History 11 (1999): 10–16. Hanawalt, Barbara A., ed. Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Haren, Michael. “Confession, Social Ethics and Social Discipline in the Memoriale presbiterorum.” In Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, 109–22 and 156–63. York: York Medieval Press, 1998. Heene, Katrien. “Vrouwen en mobiliteit in de Nederlanden: Een verkenning in Mediolatijnse teksten.” Queeste: Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde 9 (2002): 19–35. Heirbaut, Dirk. “Weduwen, erfgenamen en lenen: De evolutie van het feodale erf- en huwelijksvermogensrecht in Vlaanderen (1000–1300).” Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis 1 (1998): 7–26.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 216

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

217

Herlihy, David. Medieval Households. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. ———. Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Holbach, Rudolf. “Some Remarks on the Role of ‘Putting-out’ in Flemish and Northwest European Cloth Production.” In La Draperie ancienne des Pays-Bas: Débouchés et stratégies de survie (14e–16e siècles): Actes du colloque tenu à Gand le 28 avril 1992/Drapery Production in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Markets and Strategies for Survival (14th–16th Centuries): Proceedings of the Colloquium Ghent, April 28th 1992, edited by Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier, 207–249. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1993. Holderness, B. A. “Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay on their Economic Functions.” In Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, edited by Richard Smith, 423–442. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Howell, Martha. “From Land to Love: Commerce and Marriage in Northern Europe during the Late Middle Ages.” Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis 10 (2007): 216–53. ———. “The Gender of Europe’s Commercial Economy, 1200–1700.” Gender and History 20 (2008): 519–538. ———. The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. “The Properties of Marriage in Late Medieval Europe: Commercial Wealth and the Creation of Modern Marriage.” In Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller, and Sarah Rees Jones, 17–61. International Medieval Research, vol. 11. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. ———. Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Howell, Martha C., and Marc Boone. “Becoming Early Modern in the Late Medieval Low Countries.” Urban History 23, pt. 3 (1996): 300–24. Hutton, Shennan. “Competing Conceptualizations of Women’s Economic Activities in Fourteenth-Century Ghent,” Handelingen der maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent n.s. 56 (2005): 43–70. ———. “ ‘On Herself and All Her Property’: Women’s Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent.” Continuity and Change 20, no. 3 (2005): 325–49. ———. “Women, Men, and Markets: The Gendering of Market Space in Late Medieval Ghent,” in Urban Space: The Experience of Urban Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 409–431. Jansen, H. P. H. “Handel en nijverheid 1000–1300.” In Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 148–176. Vol. 2. Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1982. Jehel, Georges. “Le Rôle des femmes et du milieu familial à Gênes dans les activités commerciales au cours de la première moitié du XIIIe siècle.” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 53 (1975): 193–215.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 217

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

218

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Jones, Colin. Paris: Biography of a City. New York: Viking, 2004. Jordan, Erin L. Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages. New Middle Ages, ed. Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Jordan, William Chester. Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Karras, Ruth Mazo. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———. “ ‘This Skill in a Woman Is By No Means to Be Despised’: Weaving the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages.” In Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, edited by E. Jane Burns, 89–104. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Kelleher, Marie. The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Kittell, Ellen E. “The Construction of Women’s Social Identity in Medieval Douai: Evidence from Identifying Epithets.” Journal of Medieval History 25, no. 3 (1999): 215–227. ———. “Flemish Female Misdeeds: A Speculation.” In Female Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Karen Glente and Lise Winther-Jensen, 105–128. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1989). ———. From Ad Hoc to Routine: A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. ———. “Guardianship over Women in Medieval Flanders: A Reappraisal.” Journal of Social History 31, n. 4 (1998): 896–930. ———. “Reconciliation or Punishment: Women, Community, and Malefaction in the Medieval County of Flanders.” In The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam, 3–30. New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. “Testaments of Two Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Wills of Medieval Genoa and Douai.” European Review of History 5 (1998): 47–82. ———. “Women, Audience, and Public Acts in Medieval Flanders.” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 3 (1998): 74–96. ———. “Women in the Administration of the Count of Flanders.” In Frau und Spätmittelalterlicher Alltag: Internationaler Kongress Krems an der Donau 2. Bis 5. Oktober 1984, 487–503. Instituts für Mittelalterliche Realienkunde Österreichs, no. 9. Vienna: Österreische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986. Kittell, Ellen E., and Kurt Queller. “ ‘Whether Man or Woman’: Gender Inclusivity in the Town Ordinances of Medieval Douai.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 1 (2000): 63–100. Kittell, Ellen E., and Mary A. Suydam, eds. The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries. New Middle Ages, ed. Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 218

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

219

Kloek, Els. “Vrouwenarbeid aan banden gelegd? De arbeidsdeling naar sekse volgens de keurboeken van de oude draperie van Leiden, ca. 1380–1580.” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 13, no. 4 (1987): 373–402. Kowaleski, Maryanne. “Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250– 1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 38–82 and 326–344. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. “Women’s Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 145–164. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Kowaleski, Maryanne, ed. Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Kowaleski, Maryanne, and Judith M. Bennett. “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale.” In Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, edited by Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl, 11–38. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Kuehn, Thomas. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991. ———. “Person and Gender in the Laws.” In Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, 87–106. London and New York: Longman, 1998. Kusman, David. “Financiers du Prince ou ‘usuriers publics’? Le Rôle des banquiers piémontais dans les villes du duché de Brabant (XIIIe–XIVe siècle.)” Ph.D. diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2007–08. ———. “Jean de Mirabello dit van Haelen (ca. 1280–1333). Haute finance et Lombards en Brabant dans le premier tiers du XIVe siècle.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire/Belgisch tijdschrift voor filologie et geschiedenis 77 (1999): 843–931. Lambrechts, Pascale, and Jean-Pierre Sosson, eds. Les Métiers au moyen âge: Aspects économiques et sociaux: Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve 7–9 octobre 1993. Publications de l’Institut d’études médiévales, 2nd series, no. 15. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1994. Livingstone, Amy. “Aristocratic Women in the Chartrain.” In Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, edited by Theodore Evergates, 44–73. Middle Ages Series, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. “Noblewomen’s Control of Property in Early Blois-Chartres.” Medieval Prosopography 18 (1995): 55–72. LoPrete, Kimberly A. “The Gender of Lordly Women: The Case of Adela of Blois.” In Pawns or Players? Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women, edited by Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless, 90–110. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. LoPrete, Kimberly A., and Theodore Evergates. “Introduction.” In Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, edited by Theodore Evergates, 1–5. Middle Ages

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 219

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

220

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Series, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mate, Mavis E. Women in Medieval English Society. New Studies in Economic and Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Mayhew, N. J. Coinage in the Low Countries (880–1500): The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History. BAR International Series, 54. Oxford: B.A.R., 1979. McIntosh, Marjorie K. “The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300–1630.” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 3 (2005): 410–438. ———. “Women, Credit, and Family Relationships in England, 1300–1620.” Journal of Family History 30, no. 2 (2005): 143–163. ———. Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. McNamara, Jo Ann. “Women and Power through the Family Revisited.” In Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 17–30. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. McNamara, Jo Ann, and Suzanne Wemple. “The Power of Women Through the Family in Medieval Europe, 500–1100.” In Women and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 83–101. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Originally published in Feminist Studies 1 (1973): 126–42. Meijers, E. M. Het Oost-Vlaamsche erfrecht. Vol. 3 of Het Ligurische erfrecht in de Nederlanden. Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1936. Molho, Anthony. Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Munro, John H. “Monetary Contraction and Industrial Change in the LateMedieval Low Countries, 1335–1500.” In Coinage in the Low Countries (880– 1500): The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, edited by N. J. Mayhew, 95-161. BAR International Series, 54. Oxford: B.A.R., 1979. ———. “The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles: Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1270–1570.” Journal of Early Modern History 3, no. 1 (1999): 1–74. ———. “Urban Regulations and Monopolistic Competition in the Textile Industries of the Late-Medieval Low Countries.” In Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History. Proceedings of the Tenth International Economic History Congress: Session B-15, edited by Erik Aerts and John H. Munro, 41–52. Leuven: Leuven History Press, 1990. ———. “The Usury Doctrine and Urban Public Finances in Late-Medieval Flanders (1220–1550): Rentes (annuities), Excise Taxes, and Income Transfers from the Poor to the Rich,” in La fiscalità nell’economia Europea secc. XIII– XVIII = Fiscal systems in the European economy from the 13th to the 18th centuries : atti della “Trentanovesima settimana di studi” 22–26 aprile 2007, ed. Istituto internazionale di storia economica F. Datini, and Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2008), 973–1026. Online at Munich Personal

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 220

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

221

RePCc Archive [electronic archive] Paper No. 11012, posted 09 October 2008, available at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11012/. Murray, James M. Bruges: Cradle of Capitalism, 1280–1390. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. “Family, Marriage and Moneychanging in Medieval Bruges.” Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 115–125. ———. Notarial Instruments in Flanders between 1280 and 1452. Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1995. Naessens, Mariann. “Judicial Authorities’ Views of Women’s Roles in Late Medieval Flanders.” In The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam, 51–77. New Middle Ages, ed. Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Nevejans, A. “Aldus staet in scepenen bouc . . . De Registers van de Gentse schepenen van de keure in de 14de eeuw.” Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent 56 (2002): 53–64. Nicholas, David. “Crime and Punishment in Fourteenth-Century Ghent (second part).” Chap. 6 in Trade, Urbanisation and the Family: Studies in the History of Medieval Flanders. Aldershot, G.B.: Variorum, 1996. ———. The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ———. The Later Medieval City 1300–1500. A History of Urban Society in Europe. New York: Longman, 1997. ———. Medieval Flanders. London and New York: Longman, 1992. ———. The Metamorphosis of a Medieval City: Ghent in the Age of the Arteveldes, 1302–1390. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. “Of Poverty and Primacy: Demand, Liquidity, and the Flemish Economic Miracle, 1050–1200.” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 17–41. ———. Town and Countryside: Social, Economic and Political Tensions in FourteenthCentury Flanders. Bruges: De Tempel, 1971. ———. The Van Arteveldes of Ghent: The Varieties of Vendetta and the Hero in History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Nicholas, Karen. “Countesses as Rulers in Flanders.” In Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, edited by Theodore Evergates, 111–137. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Nolan, Kathleen, ed. Capetian Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Nowé, Henri. Les Baillis comtaux de Flandre: Des origines à la fin du XIVe siècle. Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1929. Ogilvie, Sheilagh. A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Owen Hughes, Diane. “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe.” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262–96. Payer, Pierre J. “Confession and the Study of Sex in the Middle Ages.” In Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, edited by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 3–31. New York and London: Garland, 1996.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 221

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

222

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Pearson, Andrea. Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, ed. Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pleij, Herman. “Inleiding: Op belofte van profijt.” In Op belofte van profijt: Stadsliteratuur en burgermoraal in de Nederlandse letterkunde van de middeleeuwen, edited by Herman Pleij, 8–52. Amsterdam, Prometheus, 1991. ———. De sneeuwpoppen van 1511: Literatuur en stadscultuur tussen middeleeuwen en moderne tijd. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1988. ———. “Taakverdeling in het huwelijk: Over literatuur en social werkelijkheid in de late middeleeuwen,” Literatuur: Tijdschrift over nederlandse letterkunde 3 (1986): 66–76. Pleij, Herman, ed. Op belofte van profijt: Stadsliteratuur en burgermoraal in de Nederlandse letterkunde van de middeleeuwen. Amsterdam, Prometheus, 1991. Prak, M., C. Lis, J. Lucassen and H. Soly, eds. Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power and Representation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Prevenier, Walter. “La Démographie des villes du comté de Flandre aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Etat de la question. Essai d’interprétation.” Revue du Nord 65, no. 257 (1983): 255–75. ———. Marriage and Social Mobility in the Late Middle Ages/Mariage et mobilité sociale au bas moyen âge: Handelingen van het colloquium gehouden te Gent op 18 april 1988. Studia Historica Gandensia, no. 274. Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1989. ———. “Violence against Women in Fifteenth-Century France and the Burgundian State.” In Medieval Crime and Social Control, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, 186–203. Medieval Cultures, vol. 16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Prevenier, Walter, and Marc Boone. “The ‘City-State’ Dream: 1300–1500.” In Ghent: In Defence of a Rebellious City: History, Art, Culture, edited by Johan Decavele, 81–105. Antwerp: MercatorFonds, 1989. Reyerson, Kathryn. “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt, 117–144. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Rogghé, P. “Mirabello, Simon de.” In Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek, vol. 1, columns 709–712. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1964–2002. Rubin, Miri. “The Languages of Late-Medieval Feminism.” In Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, 34–49. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Ruiz, Teófilo F. “Women, Work and Daily Life in Late Medieval Castile.” In Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, edited by Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels, 101–120. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London: Collins, 1987. Sheppard, Francis. London: A History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 222

2/9/2011 12:37:42 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

223

Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1560. Middle Ages Series, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Smail, Daniel Lord. The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Soly, Hugo. “The Political Economy of the European Craft Guilds,” International Review of Social History 53 suppl. (2008): 45–71. Sosson, Jean-Pierre. “Les Métiers, normes et réalité. L’exemple des anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux aux XIVe et XVe siècles.” In Le Travail au moyen âge. Une approache interdisciplinaire, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse and Collette Muraille-Samaran, 339–348. Louvain-la-Neuve: Publications de l’Institut d’études médiévales, 1990. Spufford, Peter. Handbook of Medieval Exchange. London: Royal History Society, 1986. Stabel, Peter. “Guilds in Late Medieval Flanders: Myth and Reality of Guild Life in an Export-Oriented Environment.” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 187–212. ———. “Marketing Cloth in the Low Countries: Manufacturers, Brokers and Merchants (14th–16th centuries).” In International Trade in the Low Countries (14th-16th Centuries): Merchants, Organisation, Infrastructure: Proceedings of the International Conference Ghent-Antwerp, 12th–13th January 1997, edited by Peter Stabel, Bruno Blondé, and Anke Greve, 15–36. Studies in Urban Social, Economic and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 10. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2000. ———. “Women at the Market. Gender and Retail in the Towns of Late Medieval Flanders.” In Secretum Scriptorum: Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier, edited by Wim Blockmans, Marc Boone, and Thérèse De Hemptinne, 259– 276. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 1999. Stabel, Peter, Bruno Blondé, and Anke Greve, eds. International Trade in the Low Countries (14th–16th Centuries): Merchants, Organisation, Infrastructure: Proceedings of the International Conference Ghent-Antwerp, 12th–13th January 1997. Studies in Urban Social, Economic, and Political History of the Medieval and Modern Low Countries, no. 10. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2000. Stabler, Tanya. “Now She Is Mary, Now She Is Martha: The Beguines of Paris in Medieval Society and Clerical Imagination.” Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2006. Staples, Kate Kelsey. “Inheritance in Late Medieval London: Challenging a Dualistic Gender Construct.” Paper presented at the 14th Berkshire Conference of Women’s History, Minneapolis, June 2008. Stone, Marilyn, and Carmen Benito-Vessels, eds. Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle. Middle Ages Series, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Thoen, Erik. Landbouwekonomie en bevolking in Vlaanderen gedurende de late Middeleeuwen en het begin van de modern tijden: testregio de kasselrijen van

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 223

2/9/2011 12:37:43 PM

224

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Oudenaarde en Aalst (eind 13de–eerste helft 16de eeuw). 2 vols. Ghent: Belgisch Centrum voor Landelijke Geschiedenis, 1988. Thoen, Erik, and Isabelle Devos. “Pest in de zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de middeleeuwen en de moderne tijden: Een status quaestionis over de ziekte in haar sociaal-economische context.” In De Pest in de Nederlanden: Medisch historische beschouwingen 650 jaar na de zwarte dood/La Peste aux Pay-bas: Considérations Médico-Historiques 650 ans après la peste noire, edited by Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van België, 19–43. Academia Regia Belgica MedicinaeDissertationes-Series Historica, no. 7. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1998. Tracy, James D. “On the Dual Origins of Long-Term Urban Debt in Medieval Europe.” In Urban Public Debts: Urban Government and the Market for Annuities in Western Europe (14th–18th centuries), edited by Marc Boone, Karel Davids and Paul Janssens, 13–26. Studies in European Urban History, 1100–1800, no. 3. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Vale, Malcolm. The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe: 1270–1380. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Van Caenegem, R. C. Geschiedenis van het strafprocesrecht in Vlaanderen van de XIe tot de XIVe eeuw. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1956. ———. “Law in the Medieval World.” In Legal History: A European Perspective, 115–48. London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1991. Van den Heuvel, Danielle. “Partners in Marriage and Business? Guilds and the Family Economy in Urban Food Markets in the Dutch Republic.” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 217–36. Van der Hellen, E. “Het Gentse meerseniersambacht (1305–1540).” Handelingen der maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent 31 (1977): 77–149. Vandermaesen, M. “Vlaanderen en Henegouwen onder het huis van Dampierre 1244–1384.” In Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 399–440. Vol. 2. Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1982. Van der Wee, Herman. “Structural Changes and Specialization in the Industry of the Southern Netherlands, 1100–1600.” Economic History Review 28 (1975): 203–221. Van Gerven, Jan. “Vrouwen, arbeid en sociale positie. Een voorlopig onderzoek naar de economische role en maatschappelijke positie van vrouwen in de Brabantse steden in de late Middeleeuwen.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire/Belgisch tijdschrift voor filologie et geschiedenis 73 (1995): 947–966. Van Houtte, J. A., and R. Van Uytven. “Nijverheid en handel 1300–1500.” In Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 87–111. Vol. 4. Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1980. Van Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise. “Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the ‘Industrious Revolution’, c. 1600–1800.” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 237–66. Van Uytven, Raymond. “Showing Off One’s Rank in the Middle Ages.” In Showing Status: Representations of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Wim Blockmans and Antheun Janse, 19–34. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 224

2/9/2011 12:37:43 PM

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

225

Van Werveke, Hans. Gent: Schets van een Sociale Geschiedenis. Ghent: Boekhandel Rombaut-Fecheyr, 1947. ———. De Gentsche stadsfinanciën in de middeleeuwen. Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Mémoires, collection in 8º, deuxième série, 34. Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1934. ———. “Introduction historique.” In La Draperie médiévale en Flandre et en Artois: Technique et terminologie, by Guy De Poerck, 7–25. Vol. 1. Rijksuniversiteit te Gent werken uitgegeven door de faculteit van de wijsbegeerte en letteren, no. 110. Bruges: De Tempel, 1951. ———. De koopman-ondernemer en de ondernemer in de Vlaamsche lakennijverheid van de middeleeuwen. Mededelingen van de koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunsten van België, klasse de letteren 8. Antwerp: Standaard, 1946. Vaquero, Mercedes. “Women in the Chartularies of Toledo (1101–1291),” translated by Marilyn Stone. In Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, edited by Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels, 121–146. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Verbruggen, Raf. Geweld in Vlaanderen: Macht en onderdrukking in de Vlaamse steden tijdens de veertiende eeuw. Vlaamsche Historische Studies, Genootschap voor Geschiedenis “Société d’Emulation” te Brugge, no. 12. Bruges: Marc Van de Wiele, 2005. Verhulst, Adriaan. “Prijzen van granen, boter en kaas te Brugge volgens de ‘slag’ van het Sint-Donatiaanskapittel (1348–1801).” In Dokumenten voor de geschiedenis van prijzen en lonen in Vlaanderen en Brabant, edited by C. Verlinden, 3–70. Vol. 2. Bruges: De Tempel, 1965. Ward, Jennifer. Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500. Longman History of European Women. London: Longman Pearson Education Ltd., 2002. Warlop, E. The Flemish Nobility Before 1300, translated by J. B. Ross and H. Vandermoere. Courtrai: G. Desmet-Huysman, 1975. Wensky, Margret. “Women’s Guilds in Cologne in the Later Middle Ages.” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 631–50. Wiesner, Merry E. “Having Her Own Smoke: Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 192–216. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. New Approaches to Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Wilson, Jean C. Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages: Studies in Society and Visual Culture. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Wynant, Liliane. “Peiling naar de vermogensstruktuur te Gent op basis van de staten van goed, 1380–1389.” In Studiën betreffende de sociale strukturen te

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 225

2/9/2011 12:37:43 PM

226

SELECT BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Brugge, Kortrijk en Gent in de 14de en 15de eeuw. Vol. 3, Tabellen en register van persoonsnamen, edited by W. Blockmans, C. Pauwelyn, and L. Wynant, 47–138. Standen en Landen, no. 63. Heule: U.G.A., 1973. Wunder, Heide. He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Ziegler, Joanna E. Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines of the Southern Low Countries, c. 1300–c. 1600. Brussels: Institut Historique Belge de RomeBelgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 1992.

9780230104952_11_bib.indd 226

2/9/2011 12:37:43 PM

INDEX Dutch and sometimes French terms are given in the parentheses.

Acharis, Lievin, 43–4 Lijsbette, wife of Lievin, 43–4 act, legal, 35, 42, 60 see also contracts; customary law; lawsuits activities, women’s economic definition of, 2–3 see also credit; marketselling; production; property; work aldermen (schepenen, échevins) of the Gedele, 14, 19, 25, 30, 38, 91–6, 137–9 aldermen (schepenen, échevins) of the Keure annual registers of, 2, 5–7, 11, 14, 26–7, 35–6, 52 and Cloth Hall stalls, 116–17 concerns of, 26, 35, 40–3, 46, 48–53, 67, 77–8, 146, 149 enforcement of debt contracts, 82–4, 100 judgments in lawsuits, 66, 69, 74–6, 89, 95, 141 membership of, 26, 28–9, 86, 99, 116, 144 powers and responsibilities of, 1, 13–14, 25–6, 30, 36, 127 and redaction of customary law in sixteenth century, 37–40 shift in interpretation of custom, 129, 134–6 and women’s legal economic acts, 35–6, 38, 40–3, 52–8, 61–3, 74–8, 90, 108, 120 Alverdoe, Clais, 45 Amelakens, Celie, 86 amman, 25 Amman, widow of sir Ghelnoet, 85

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 227

annual registers ( jaarregisters), see aldermen annuities (renten), 61 hereditary (erfrenten), 40–1, 53–4, 69, 75, 91 life-rent (lijfrenten), 69, 81 Ansbeke, Lievin van, 1–2, 7, 14 Antwerp, 103–4, 125, 147 appraisers, 30 apprenticeship, 10, 31, 108, 113–14, 118, 132 arbiters (vinders) and arbitration, 26–7, 73–6, 95, 129, 140, 144 Artevelde, Jacob van, 24–6, 71–2 Artois, count of, 125 Assenede, 94–5 Audenarde, 30 Baerds, widow of Jan, 89 bailiffs, comital, 25–7, 55, 125 bakers, 29, 92, 118–19 barbers, 112–13 Bardi, Giovanni, 86 beguines, 11, 32, 52, 104, 115, 135–6, 151–2 Bennett, Judith, 10 bequests, 44, 66, 74, 75 Berevelts, Lelie, 65 Beyerix, Trune, 66 bijleving, see usufruct Black Death, see plague Blanckaerds, Beatrise, 35–6, 41, 51, 56–7 Blasers, Lijsbette s, 65 Bliec, Jan, 65 Bloemen, Beatrise, 55–6 Ghiseline, 55

2/10/2011 12:39:30 PM

228

IN DEX

Blois, 152 Blomenrod, Thideman, 76 blue-dyeing and blue-dyers, 107–8, 112, 132–3 Boelaer, Arend, 54 Bollaerd, Jan, 118 borg, see sureties Borluut, Eleene, 141 Kateline, 47, 107, 110–11, 141 as patrician family, 47, 141 Pieter, 141 borrowing, see credit Boutersem age of majority in, 38 Brabant, 30, 71–2 Braem, Jan, 35–6 brewers, 29, 118–19 Brijsteesten, Roeger, 140 brokers, 28 Bruges, 19, 22–3, 72, 76, 93, 118, 147, 152 Brussels, 72 buitenpoorters, see citizens, outside burgher construction, 120, 151 aldermen’s interpretations and formulas, 45–9, 54–8, 63, 93 decline of, 127–40 definition of, 3–6 and families, 4, 30–4, 60–2, 77–9, 95 in Ghent, Low Countries and northwest Europe, 9–10, 146–7, 153 origins of, 123–6 and property, 63, 66, 75 and work, 104, 113–15, 119 burghers, see elites; guilds; patricians; poor Burgundian dukes and duchesses, 7, 24, 131, 152 butchers, 27, 29 Cahier Primitif, 38–40 capital, commercial, 5, 10, 13, 69–70, 82, 87, 92, 100, 111, 119, 145 see also commerce; markets capitalism, 111, 136

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 228

carding and carders, 11, 20, 111, 145, 193 n. 36 Castile, 148 Certeau, Michel de, 105 Champagne, 152 charity of beguines and nuns, 32, 89 institutions of, 9, 29 charters possessed by women, 51, 74 of privileges (keuren), 25, 36 see also chirographs Chartres, 152 children daughters’ portions of inheritance, 59, 69 education of, 62 emancipation of minor, 30–1 and family property, 32–4, 62, 90, 141, 153 gifts of parents to religious, 69 guardianship of minor, 30, 96, 140 and guild membership, 21, 112–14, 118 illegitimate, 31 inheritance rights of, 30–1 mothers’ relations with adult male, 59–60, 96–7, 107–8, 150–1 and noble landholding, 8, 12, 124, 126 parental authority over, 30 persons identified in acts as, 50–4, 70–2, 76–7, 83, 92, 96, 100, 106–8, 137, 145, 148 and women’s acts, 150–1 and work, 106–8, 114, 116–17, 119, 149 see also orphans chirographs acts and contracts written in, 52, 69, 91, 94–5, 124–5 definition of, 13–14, 26–7 as legal proof, 26–7, 52, 56, 83 choice contiuum of, 61–3, 70–9 women’s exercise of, 3, 5, 60–3, 78, 97, 120, 131, 145, 150–1

2/10/2011 12:39:30 PM

IN DEX

church institutions, 29 cities in continental northwestern Europe, 6–7, 10–12, 31–2, 104, 120, 134, 142, 147, 150, 152–3 economic investments and circulation of wealth in, 69–72 in England, 130, 147–8 finance in, 82–5, 90–1, 100, 117, 132 Ghent compared with other cities of the Low Countries, 4–11, 19–23, 25, 31–3, 36, 129, 146–8, 152 in Italy, 6, 13, 22, 28, 82, 130 legal systems and government in, 22–7, 30, 36, 55, 109, 130–1, 133, 148 size comparison of Ghent and other, 1, 6, 19, 132 social conditions in, 28–32 see also names of individual cities; order; public space; wool cloth production citizens legal status of, 23, 167 n. 67 outside citizens (buitenpoorters), 23, 28 significance of, 23, 25, 27, 82 women as, 124–5 city accounts (stadsrekeningen), 14, 27, 82, 84, 183 n. 9 city lots (erven), 40–1, 43, 51, 59, 64, 66, 68, 71, 76, 92, 96, 126 clerics, see religious clerks, 27, 35–6, 60, 166 n. 57 comital, 25 and performance, 60–1, 87 use of legal formulas, 36, 40–2, 44–57, 65, 73–5, 81, 83, 85, 89, 93, 99, 106, 108, 116, 128, 138, 140–1, 144, 148–9, 173 n. 52 Clèves, 72 cloth, see markets; silk; wool cloth production Cloth Hall (Lakenhalle, Wolhuis), 109, 195 n. 65 lords of (halleheeren), 27 ownership of stalls, 115–17

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 229

229

women market sellers in, 115–17, 119, 145 coinage, see money collateral for debt contracts, see credit Cologne, 148 combing and combers, 11, 20, 52, 111, 193 n. 36 commerce, 27–8, 136 international, 6, 9, 18–22, 28, 84–6, 100, 110–11 women’s capital invested in, 5, 13, 58, 69–70, 79, 84, 100, 114, 157 n. 15 see also markets; investment community property, see property; marital property customs conjugal pair, see married couple construction, see burgher construction; patrimonial construction continuity, 25–130 and argument of discontinuity, 10–11 of women’s economic lives, 3, 35–6, 49, 53–4, 58, 61, 77, 90, 121, 151 contracts aldermen and, 1, 13, 46, 50, 56, 84, 146 for apprenticeship, 114 clerk’s procedures for, 26–7 in credit transactions, 1–2, 35, 42, 50, 53, 75, 82–4, 93, 97, 100 gender and activity patterns in, 35–6, 42–6, 68–70, 82–4 identification patterns in, 35–6 inheritance, 66 legal capability of women to make, 2, 8, 36–40, 45–6, 106–8, 138–9 marriage, 9 provisioning, 21, 29, 86 in sales transactions, 2, 25, 40–1, 45, 63, 68–70, 85, 140 as sources, 14, 19, 26, 40, 106 see also women, legal capability of coopwijven (female merchants), 7, 38–40, 51, 128–9, 171 n. 30

2/10/2011 12:39:30 PM

230

IN DEX

costbodinghe van eede, (debt denial by oath), 74 counts and countesses of Flanders, 8, 12, 22–8, 33, 36, 71, 125–6, 131, 139–40 see also individual names Courtrai, 84 courts of law, 13 aldermen’s, 25–7, 44, 54, 75, 106, 152 of appeal, 26, 46 church, 25–6 comital and comital feudal, 25–7, 46, 139–40 competing jurisdiction among, 27, 45–6, 53, 55, 64, 93, 139–41 Coutume Homologuée, 36–40, 42, 46, 49–50, 58 coverture, 7 see also coopwijven crafts, see individual craft names; guilds; wool cloth production credit, 81–101 collateral, 40–1, 60 contracts and acknowledgements, 1–2, 53–4, 73, 97, 110 debt collection, 35–6, 51, 54, 56, 74, 118 formulas and procedures for, 1–2, 13, 27, 35–6, 40, 71, 74, 82–3, 106–8, 125 liability and security for creditors, 37, 50, 55–6, 62, 68, 73, 89, 110 loans to the city, voluntary and forced, 84–5, 99 married couples as economic partners in, 43–4, 53, 92–7, 106–10, 146 of married women in their own names, 53, 71–5 moneylender-pawnbrokers (persemiers) and, 84 quit declarations, 4, 44, 47, 74, 82–3, 93, 96, 137, 140 single women compared to widows in, 88–91 tools for, 61, 69, 82 widows and late husbands’ creditors, 37, 50, 55–6, 62, 68, 73, 89, 110

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 230

women as moneylenders, 10, 79, 81–3, 90–2 women’s activities in economic sectors of, 81–2, 85–6 women’s loans to city, 84–5, 91 women’s relationships in, 97–101 Criekersteen, Jan, 141–2 customary law aldermen and, 13, 25–7, 78, 117 in burgher and patrimonial constructions, 3–4, 32–3, 46, 78, 123–6, 129, 137–9, 142 comparison of Ghent’s and Low Countries’, 8–10, 93, 124, 146–7, 150 comparison of oral and written, 7, 35, 40, 52, 74–5, 84 and construction of norms, 143–4 inheritance customs, 3, 30–1, 41, 60–2, 66, 74, 148 marital property, 93, 148 patriarchal limits, 54–6, 108 redaction of, 36–40 Damme, 76 Danneel, Marianne, 7–8 daughters, see children; single women De Beisere, Jan, 107 De Blaewere, Jan, 107 De Blonde, Pauwels, 75 De Bruwere, Lijsbette, 83 debts, see contracts; credit De Gruter, Aechte, wife of Everdey, 83 Everdey, 83 De Jonghe, Clais, 92–4 Heinric, 92–4 De Kempe, Boudin, 35 Del Merre, Verghine, 124 De Mercato, family of Piedmontese bankers, 84 De Mirabello, Jean, 71 Kateline, 70–8, 145 Lijsbette, 72 Simon, 71–5 demography, 130 Den Amman, Lievin, 118

2/10/2011 12:39:30 PM

IN DEX

Den Blauwere, Aeghte, wife of Jaquemarde, 112 Jaquemarde, 112 Rueben, 83 De Necker, Symoen, 57, 146 Den Quinquere, Willem, 44 Den Vaudere, Simoen, 117 Den Vos, Joes, 39 De Pape, Jan, 1 Mergriete, 93–4, 96 De Peyster, Jan, 96 depression, late medieval, 20–2, 132 see also economy; wool cloth production De Proesst, Lisbette, 85 Der leken spieghel, The Laymen’s Mirror, 103–4, 120, 131 De Ruddre, Clais, 118 De Visch, Jan, 112 De Vos, Kateline, 107–8 Lievin, 107–8 discourses, 3–6, 15, 18, 31, 33, 40, 45–6, 54, 61, 123–6, 130, 134, 136, 138, 142, 144 disputes, see lawsuits domestic service, 10, 32, 66, 114, 128 Dotter, Jan, 107 Douai, 8–9, 12, 147, 149 dowry and dower, 13, 37, 126 drapers, 11, 20, 107–11, 116–18, 124–5, 145, 147 drapery, see wool cloth production Dullaerds, Boudin, 53, 66 Jehane, wife of Boudin, 53 dyeing, 5, 11, 20, 85, 107–8, 112, 132–3, 147 economy definition and scope of women’s economic activities, 2–3, 5–6, 13, 120, 143, 145 economic structures in Ghent, 19–22, 33, 109, 131–2 gender in economic sectors, 61, 67 see also capital; commerce; credit; guilds; markets; work education, 31, 62

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 231

231

Edward III, King of England, 23–4, 71–2 elc over al, each of them for everything, 2 elites, 11, 14, 27, 41 acceptance of burgher construction, 48, 95, 97, 152 and change to patrimonial construction, 129, 131, 134–6, 138–41 dominance of most profitable economic activities of, 5, 19–22 elite male preserves, 61, 70, 78, 86, 115–16, 118, 141, 144–5, 148 factionalism and political power of, 22–3, 24–7, 54, 131 groups belonging to, 12–13, 22–3, 28–9 guild, 1, 19–21, 28–9, 63, 86, 109–10, 113, 117 merchant, 12, 86 surnames in acts, 47–8, 85, 99–100 urban, 12–13, 18, 22, 28–31, 69, 140 women, 3, 5, 31–2, 35, 47, 52–4, 62, 69, 145, 151 see also nobles; patricians elopement, 31, 135 emancipation, 3, 7–8, 30, 32, 38, 40, 139 embargoes on English wool, 20–4 England, 22–4, 28, 33, 71 comparison of Ghent to the cities of, 7, 18, 28, 49 comparison of Ghent women to women in, 38, 49, 90, 128, 130, 148 wool exports and embargoes of, 20–4, 34, 109 see also Hundred Years’ War epidemic, see plague Erembodegem, 74 erf, city lot, 40–1, 43, 51, 59, 64–8, 71, 76, 92, 96 erfachtige lieden, hereditary people, legal institution of, 27 erfrent, hereditary annuity, see annuities

2/10/2011 12:39:30 PM

232

IN DEX

family, 29–34, 108, 114, 120 agnatic and cognatic/collateral structures of, 3, 12–13, 31–4, 153 burgher and patrimonial systems of, 3–4, 12–13, 32–3, 36, 41, 45–6, 123–4, 126, 147 control over women’s economic activities versus negotiation, 2, 5, 8, 45, 58, 62, 78, 93, 104, 131–2, 136, 145, 150 in credit relationships, 83, 97–100 feuds and violence, 22, 25, 29 identification of women by, 8, 35, 47 interfamily disputes, 94–7, 139–42 property of, 54, 59–62, 66, 68, 92, 138 sides of, 62, 126 women and strategies of, 15, 18, 22, 24, 43, 56–7, 59–60, 79, 94, 146, 150–1 and women’s acts, 43, 54, 57–8 see also household; inheritance, married couple femmes soles, 7, 38 feudal system, see fiefs; land, feudal and noble landholding; nobles feuds, 22, 25, 29, 32 fiefs, 8, 30, 37, 66, 73–4, 126–7, 139, 152 Flanders burgher and patrimonial constructions in, 4, 33–4, 124 burgher literature in, 31, 103–4, 131 commonalities and particularities in cities of, 25, 34, 130, 146, 149 conf lict in, 23–4, 71, 131 economy of, 19, 22, 71–2, 82, 106, 109, 120, 132 nobles in, 28, 126, 152 surnames in, 50–1 women in, 8–9, 31–2, 50, 60, 130, 147 see also names of individual cities and villages; Low Countries Florence, 6, 86, 130, 148 formulas, legal, 2, 4–5, 15, 53, 60, 83, 93 and categories of women’s economic activities, 40–57

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 232

husband’s consent or permission, 53 of identification, 40–2 for representation, 44–5 France, 19–24, 28, 139 women in, 8–9, 13, 90, 104, 128, 146–7, 152–3 see also names of individual cities; Hundred Years’ War Franc of Bruges, 93 Friday Market Square, 17–18, 21, 23, 34, 119, 125 friends and relatives, (vrienden en magen), 62, 97, 151 fullers and fulling, 20, 110, 112, 117, 125 fullers guild, 18, 21–5 Gedele, see aldermen of the Gedele gender and activity status, 42, 48, 63–4, 67, 87, 127–8, 148 boundaries, 18, 54–6, 66–7, 104–5, 144–5 constructions of space, 105–6, 111, 116 in credit relationships, 86, 97–8, 101, 106–8 gender dyads, 8, 147 gender norms, 2–3, 5, 9–10, 13–14, 30–3, 104–5, 109, 130 aldermen and, 46, 53, 56, 83, 137–8 in burgher and patrimonial constructions, 31–3, 36, 45, 115, 123, 143 change in, 38–40, 123–42 in law and customary law, 7, 9–10, 14–15, 36–9, 136–9, 149–50 revealed by acts, 2, 14–15, 40–2 see also burgher construction; patrimonial construction Genoa, 6, 148 Germany, 86, 104, 146–8, 153 Gheilard, Betkine, 117 Heinric, 117 Kallekin, 117 Ghent, 8–10, 146–7 citizenship in, 28 corporate government of, 21–7, 130–1 economic developments in, 18–22, 33–4, 132–4

2/10/2011 12:39:30 PM

IN DEX

importance of, 1, 6, 13, 19 population of, 18–19, 22, 31–2 rebellions and violence in, 17–18, 22–5, 34, 130–1 social groups of, 12–13, 28–9, 32, 125–7 see also aldermen; customary law; economy; government; social order Ghent Rebellion of, 13, 79–85, 24 Ghiseliins, Lisbette, 44 government of Ghent, 25–7 see also aldermen; Artevelde; customary law; Three Members grain trade, 17, 19, 21–3, 28–9, 33, 86, 99, 118 Gravensteen, Count’s Castle, 25, 140 Great Council, Brede Raad,Collatie, 25, 138 guardianship of adult women, 2, 7–8, 30, 32, 42, 44–8, 63–4, 67, 81, 87, 124, 127–8 in Brabant, 30, 147 and emancipation, 32, 37 of husbands over wives, 4, 44–5, 95–6, 137–8, 140–1, 146 of minors and orphans, 25, 32, 44, 64, 76, 92–6, 112, 117, 140, 151 guilds, 29, 104 apprenticeship in, 10, 31, 108, 113–14, 118, 132 elite leadership of, 19–22, 27–9, 105, 117, 129, 144, 148 and non-guild crafts, 105–6, 109 political role of, 18, 21–5, 28–9, 33, 131 provisioning, 22, 28–9 regulations of, 105–6, 109 small guilds, kleine neringen, 21–4, 29 social groups in, 28–9, 105 women’s membership in or exclusion from, 5, 21, 30–1, 100, 105, 109–10, 112–14, 118–20, 132–4, 142–4 and work identities, 113 see also names of individual crafts; elites

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 233

233

Guy of Dampierre, count of Flanders (r. 1278–1305), 124–5 Habsburg state, 38 haer selves wijf, her own woman, legal category of, 40, 138 Haghelsteene, Jan, 83 Kateline, 83 Halleheeren, Lords of the Cloth Hall, 27 Hanse, the, 76 Heusden, 72 Hijssone, Aghate, 50 Pieter, 50 Hoogpoort, 40–1 hospitals, 29, 94, 144 hostelers, 28, 86, 99 Houdewinds, Cateline, 44 household, 6, 30–1, 54, 59, 77, 105 economy and survival strategies of, 24, 56, 79, 144–6 expectation that women be in male-dominated households, 104, 120, 133–6, 149 heads of, 3, 10, 31–2, 124 role of wives in, 6, 33, 38, 43, 54, 104, 106–20, 144 shop, 106–15, 119 single women in own, 31, 79, 115, 120, 133–5, 151 women’s activities for benefit of, 54, 56, 79, 149–51 see also family; married couple Howell, Martha C., 9, 14, 105 Hundred Years’ War, 19, 22–5, 28–9, 32–3, 71–2, 124, 145 effect on women’s economic activities of, 24–5, 130–1, 151 Husbands absence or death of, 7, 10, 12, 21, 30, 39, 52, 61, 84–6, 112, 145 authority over wife versus negotiation with wife, 3–5, 7, 9–10, 31–2, 46, 62–3, 76–9, 95–7, 103–5, 132, 135–6, 138, 145–6, 150 consent or permission of, 4, 39, 53–4, 61, 66, 93, 128, 137, 144 customary rights of, 37–40, 84, 138

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

234

IN DEX

Husbands—Continued management of wives’ property by versus wives acting without, 3, 7, 13, 46, 54–5, 70–8, 129, 137–9 as source of widows’ property & identity, 41, 49–52, 85, 89–90, 100, 115, 117–19, 126, 149 and women’s work, 103–15, 120, 123, 133, 144 Huy age of majority in, 38 identification patterns, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14–15, 35–6, 40–2, 47, 50–4, 62, 65, 73, 81, 85, 89–95, 105, 117, 120, 125, 128, 134, 141, 144, 147–9, 151 immovables, see property Inghele, Brother Jan, 84 inheritance and aldermen of the Gedele, 14, 25 burgher and patrimonial constructions of, 3–4, 56, 124, 126 children and, 30–1, 37 customary law and, 3, 30–2, 36–7, 46, 62, 70–6, 123, 126, 139, 147–8 daughters and, 13, 30–1, 52, 55–6 division of, 5, 41, 50, 59–60, 68, 83, 96–7 lawsuits over, 56, 70–8, 137–8 see also customary law; family; marital property customs inspectors, 30, 105 investment, 5 in credit markets, 82, 87, 92, 96, 100 by family, 15, 27, 150 in property markets, 66–70, 79, 144 by women, 11, 36, 53–4, 61, 100, 105, 144, 146, 152–3 Isabel of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy, 12

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 234

Italy, cities of, 6–7, 13, 19–20, 22, 28, 82, 130 see also names of individual cities ius commune, 46, 124, 139 Jews, 81 Joan, Countess of Flanders (r. 1206–44), 12 joncvrouw, the title, 35, 40–1, 43–5, 47–8, 51, 53–4, 56, 81, 85, 92, 95, 99, 117, 137, 140 Jordan, William Chester, 81–2, 87, 99 judgments, see aldermen; lawsuits jurisdiction disputes among courts over, 55, 93, 139–41 non-contentious jurisdiction, vrijwillige rechtspraak, 25 overlapping authorities in Ghent and, 25–7, 46 Keeland, Hughe, 94 Keure, see aldermen kinship and kin relations, see family; networks Kittell, Ellen, 7–9, 12, 149 kleine neringen, small guilds, 21–4 Koens, Mergriete, 117 land, 55, 59, 72, 82, 85, 140 burgher and patrician landholding, 22, 28, 77, 126–7, 139 as collateral, 41, 59, 75, 105 feudal and noble landholding, 4, 30, 124, 126, 152 rural, 28, 45, 66, 70–4, 92–6, 100 types of landholding and required legal formulas, 45, 139–41, 144 see also inheritance; property Langheroc, Lisbette, 81–2 Languedoc, 148 law comparison of legal systems, 147–8 and construction of gender norms, 9, 14, 143 feudal law, 4, 124 legal capability of women, see women

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

IN DEX

Roman, 37, 39, 139 see also customary law lawsuits, 38 as economic acts, 2, 42, 50, 54–6 judgments of aldermen on, 26, 38, 138 over debts, 87, 98 over property, 63–6, 78–9, 95–6, 140–1 as sources, 2, 25, 27, 42, 86 lawyers, 38–40, 138–9, 153 Leewarde, Gherard, 43–4 Leiden, 147 Leuward, Gillis, 141 liability, 2, 83–4, 93, 100, 108 Libersa, Jan, 44 life course, lifecycle, 3, 9–11, 49, 114–15, 146 lijfrent, liferent annuity, see annuities Lille, 30, 38 Limbourg, 38 literature, 31, 33, 134–6 Flemish burgher, 31, 103–5, 131, 135–6 loans, see credit Lombardy, 71 London, 6, 19 Longelle, Ysabel, 125 looms, 111 Louchys, Eyzoete, wife of Jan, 83 Jan, 83 Louis of Male, Count of Flanders (r. 1346–84), 21, 24 Louis of Nevers, Count of Flanders (r. 1323–46), 23–4, 71–2 Low Countries comparison of England and, 7 comparison of Ghent and cities of, 6, 10–12, 26, 31 customary law in, 26–7, 36–38 women in, 5, 8, 111, 115, 123, 128–9, 146–51, 153 see also names of individual cities and states maintenance agreements, 66, 81 majority, age of, 30, 37–8, 139

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 235

235

mambours, legal agents of women in Brabant, 30, 147 management of community property by married women, 61, 70–6, 77–8 by husbands of their wives’ property, 45–7, 58, 70–1, 77–8, 95, 137–8 performance and, 5, 61–3, 70, 79, 146 of property, 3–6, 9, 11, 33, 36, 52–4, 57–8, 59–61, 66, 79, 104, 123, 130–2, 134, 140, 143–5, 147, 149, 151–2 of personal property by married women, 4, 42, 46, 54, 60–1, 77, 79, 90, 136 of a shop, 114, 118, 120–1 by widows of their late husband’s property, 41, 50–1 of wool cloth production by drapers, 19–20, 108–11 see also customary law; property Margaret, Countess of Flanders (r. 1244–78), 12 Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, 12 marital property customs, 4, 32, 36–7, 59, 71–4, 124, 147–8 marital status, 2–3, 6, 8–12, 15, 35–6, 41–2, 49–53, 58, 65, 68, 83, 85, 89–90, 97, 120, 123, 125, 128–9, 134–6, 138, 142, 144, 146–9, 153 see also unknown, women whose marital status is markets, 136 credit, 79, 81–2, 86, 89–90, 99–101, 104, 125 international, 5, 19–22, 28, 33, 105, 132–3 local and regional, 22, 28, 119 marriage, 114 property, 15, 61, 66–70, 78, 126 space, 17–8, 23, 27, 105–6, 115–17, 125, 146 wool cloth, 106, 112 see also names of individual market places; commerce; marketselling

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

236

IN DEX

marketselling, 5, 34, 38, 104, 115–20, 129, 133, 144–5 retail distribution in wool cloth production, 117–18 marriage, 2–3, 6, 9, 52, 54, 71, 137, 147 contracts, 9 discourses about, 103–4, 131, 136 and economic partnership, 2, 60–1, 65, 92–4, 96–7, 104, 114, 120, 128 gifts, 13, 37, 59 intermarriage of social groups, 126, 131, 152 patterns of, 31–2 second, 37, 72, 76 married couple, 6, 12, 41, 43–7, 59–61, 92–6, 103–11, 117 married women, 1–5, 7–13, 26, 31, 33, 36, 38–47, 49, 51, 53–8, 60–2, 65–6, 68–79, 81, 84, 89, 105, 114–15, 120, 128–9, 132–3, 137–9, 141, 144–5, 148–9 legal capability or incapability of, 2–3, 5, 7, 10–11, 34, 36–40, 49–54, 61, 66, 75, 124, 127, 138, 142–3, 147, 149 Martin, Jan, 50 Mary of Burgundy, 12 Masengarbe, Pieter, 74 masons, 70, 94, 100 Meat Hall, Vleeshuis, 27 Mechelen, 72 Medemans, Mergriete, 66 Melsele, 72 Members of Ghent, 2, 14, 21–2, 24–9, 130 mercery and mercers, 5, 11, 84, 112, 118, 120, 133 merchants, 76, 82, 86, 103 coopwijven as, 7, 38–9, 51, 128, 138–9 and drapers, 20, 109–11, 125 as elite group, 12, 19–22, 28–9, 33, 99 of grain, 17, 22–4, 99 Italian, 19, 118 wholesale, 19–22, 116, 118 wine, 47, 75, 86 Metten Scapen, Sir Symoen, 1 Michiel the underbailiff, 125

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 236

Miere, Kateline, 97 Pieter, 97 militia, 23–4, 115, 132 Minnemans, Kateline, 1–2, 7, 14 minority, see children; guardianship mobility, occupational, 10, 21, 113 Moelges, Lente, 57 Mond, Gillis, 107–8 Monds, Alijse, 117 money, 21, 82 comparisons of monetary value, 1, 35, 70, 82, 87, 94, 100 moneychangers, 6, 86 moneylender-pawnbrokers, persemiers, 84 moneylending, see credit movables, see property Naes, Mergriete, 95 negotiation in aldermen’s courts, 26, 30, 33, 62–3, 78 of women with family members, 3, 5, 57–8, 61–3, 70, 78–9, 120, 145 networks, 14, 66 of craftspeople, 111, 125 elite, 144–5 female networks, 81, 99 kinship, 4, 29, 32 social, 29, 62, 75–6, 92, 131, 151–2 Nicholas, David, 6–8 nobles, 12–13, 23–4, 27–9, 70–1, 85, 126, 131–2, 151 landholding, 4, 8–9, 70 men in contracts and lawsuits, 55, 64, 77, 91, 92–4, 140 and patrimonial construction, 12–13, 124, 126 women, 8, 12, 30, 144, 152 women in contracts and lawsuits, 13, 44, 47–8, 71–8, 92–4, 100, 152 norms, see constructions, burgher and patrimonial; gender norms nuns, 32, 36, 49, 51, 59, 89 oaths, 13, 51–2, 60, 74, 106–7, 114, 181 n. 76 Occitania, 152

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

IN DEX

occupations, see work Oerneke, Jan, 64 old clothes sellers, 112, 118 Oostende, 93 order public, 26, 31, 136 social, 29, 131, 134 orphans, 1, 7–8, 14, 25, 30, 32, 92–3, 99, 118 Parijs, Jan, 99 Paris, 6, 19, 71, 115, 147–8, 151 particularism, 9, 22, 25, 33–4, 130, 146, 149 partnership, economic, 41–4, 48, 54, 57, 59–61, 63–5, 67–9, 87, 92–4, 98, 106–12, 124, 127–8, 140–2 patriarchy, 3–5, 9, 11, 15, 30–1, 34, 46, 54, 56, 61, 104, 133, 142, 146, 150 patricians, 70, 85, 126, 131, 145, 152 as aldermen, 1, 54, 63 as elite group, 12, 28–9, 144 men in acts, 47–8, 72, 75–6, 110, 118, 140 as a political Member of Ghent, 22, 24 political role of, 23–5, 27 women in acts, 47, 53–4, 83, 97, 141 patrimonial construction, 3–6, 9, 13, 33, 36, 45–9, 55, 58, 61, 63, 76–8, 123–4, 126–7, 129–32, 134, 136, 138–43 patronage, 11–12, 151–2 peat, 22, 66, 69–70, 76, 92 Pepercoren, Jan, 89 performance, 7–8, 14–15, 42–3, 60–1, 63–6, 77, 79, 86, 93–4, 104, 106–8, 123, 128, 136, 138, 140, 142–5, 149, 152–3 permission clauses, 4, 39–40, 54, 57, 61, 74, 137, 140–1 Perwez, 72 Philip VI, King of France, 23 Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, 126 Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 131 plague, 18–19, 32, 106, 124, 130, 145 pledges, see sureties

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 237

237

Ploughers, Mergriete s, 110 poor, the social group of the, 29 poorterij, see patricians Porete, Marguerite, 135 priests, 66, 74, 94 property, 59–79, 106 aldermen’s emphasis on rights of, 26, 40, 42, 46, 50, 77–8, 137–8 and burgher and patrimonial constructions, 3–4, 13, 32–3, 36, 45–6, 48, 54, 58, 75–8, 123, 126, 137–42 buying and selling, 2–3, 43, 52, 63–4, 67–8 as collateral, 1–2, 83, 92 community, 4–5, 7, 30, 37–8, 41, 43, 46, 51, 53, 59, 61–2, 64, 69, 71–8, 85, 93, 100 customary law on, 4, 9, 30–2, 36–40, 71–8, 126 division of inherited, 25, 59 and family, ideas about, 13, 36, 46–7, 59–61, 131 and identification patterns, 41–2, 49–2 immovable and movable, 12, 37, 55, 59–60, 71–2, 74, 76, 126–7, 138–9, 153 investments and markets, 15, 66–70, 126 women’s ownership of property and legal capability, 2–3, 5, 11, 36, 52–5, 60–1, 63, 143–5, 147–9, 152–3 personal, eigen goed, 4, 30–1, 37, 46, 47, 52–3, 59–64, 71–8, 83–5, 90, 93–4, 120, 129, 132, 137–8, 144 see also inheritance prosopography, 53, 143 public office, 8–9, 21, 30 public space, 8, 30, 42–3, 60, 115 Puls, Steven, 1 putting-out system, 111 quarter of Ghent, 23, 26 rebellions, see revolts receivers, 8, 56

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

238

IN DEX

recession, see economy reconciliation, zoen, 25 registers, see aldermen religious, the, 29–30, 39, 49, 65, 68–9, 84, 89, 104, 129, 135, 151–2 representation male representation of women, 44–7 temporary, 35–6, 44 revolts, 22–4, 29 see also Artevelde; Ghent Rebellion; Ghent Rhineland, 19, 31–2 Rijm, Brame, 56 Marie, 55–6 Symoen, 55–6 Rijnvisch, Clais, 53–4 Gillis, 1, 47, 97 Kateline, 53–4 patrician family of, 97 Robbe, Everdey, 107 Rouen, 148 Rueden, Alijse s, 66 St. Elizabeth’s beguinage, 32, 52 saints’ names, 91 sales contracts, see property Scettorf, Jan, 92, 94–6 Mergriete, 92–8, 145, 150–1 schepenen, see aldermen Scinkel, Jan, 86, 117 Sconejans, Jan, 74 seals and sealing contracts, 13–14, 25–7 Sels, Mergriete, 99 Ser Maecheleins, Celie wife of Jan, 43 Jan, 43 SerSanders, Jan, 140 Jurdaen, 110–11 SerThomaes, Symoen, 75 service, domestic, 32 shippers, 29 silk, 107–8, 147 Simons, Walter, 11 single women, 10–11, 30–3, 36, 44, 49–54, 68–9, 89–90, 103, 114, 120, 128, 133–6, 139, 142, 148–9 Sint Baafs abbey, 25–6

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 238

Sint Pieters abbey, 25–6 small guilds, kleine neringen, 22, 24, 26, 29 Smeesters, Bette, 125 smiths, 114 Sneewere, Pauwels, 50 Sneewers, Pieter, 50 sons, see children sources of actual practice, 7, 13, 27 aldermen’s annual registers as, 13–15, 27 amount and type in different eras, 19 prescriptive and normative, 7, 27, 36–40 space, theories of, 105 Speciers, Juete, 40–1 Sperling, Jutta Gisela, 148 spice merchants, 112–13, 118 Spikelboere, Heinric, 94 spinning, spinners, and spinsters, 11, 20, 52, 111 status, labor, 10–11, 19–20, 105, 109, 111–13, 115, 118, 120 Staveliin, Jan, 44 sureties, borgen, 1–2, 35, 47, 75–6, 83, 87, 92–3, 96–7, 99–100, 139, 151 tax farmers, 8, 21, 29, 71, 75, 86, 99 Temmermans, Marie, 85 terminology, see formulas textile, see wool cloth production Three Members, government of Ghent, 2, 24 Tieselincs, Kateline, 52 Tournai, 26, 38 Trijl, Jacob, 45, 140 Jan, 45, 140 Lijsbette, wife of Jan, 45, 140 Tsuul, Alleene, 59 Clementie, 59–61, 145 Kateline, 59 Mathijs, 59 Ogier, 59 unemployment, see economy; wool cloth production; work Zoetin, 59

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

IN DEX

unknown, women whose marital status is, 49–53, 65, 68, 89–91, 120, 128–9, 149 usufruct, bijleving, 13, 30, 37, 45, 60, 73–4, 124, 126, 140 usury, 82, 135 Ute Merham, Avezoete, 99 family, 99 Godeverd, 99 Uten Berghe, Jan, 2 Uten Dale, Diederic, 99 Jan, 117 Marie, wife of Jan, 117 Uten Rosen, Diederic, 40–1 Kateline, wife of Diederic, 40–1 Uten Swane, Gherem, 72 Uten Wissele, Pieter, 43 Valenciennes, 38 Van Aelst, Aechte, wife of Simoen, 116–17 Simeon, 116–17 Van Ardericke, Jan, 140–1 Van Artevelde, Willem, ser Jan’s son, 83 Van Boendale, Jan, 103–4, 106, 119–20, 131 Van Brakele, Agnees, 45 Van Buxelaer, Beatrice, 51–2 Van Cleempitte, Mergriete, 51 Van Coleghem, Alise, 40–1 Ghiselbrecht, 55 Mergriete, 40–1 Van Curtrike, Jan, 81 Van den Bossche, Jan, 53 Mergriete, 66 Staes, 117 Van den Conkele, Lisbette, 84, 118, 120 Van den Hamme, Frank, 92–5 Jan, (Annekine), 96 Van den Kerchove, Marie, 47, 97 Pieter, 47 Van den Leene, Kateline, 91–2 Van den Pale, Mergriete, 51 Van den Pitte, Avesoete, 99 elite family of, 99 Van den Scake, Aechte, 118

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 239

239

Van den Spieghele, Mergriete, widow of Pieter, 99 Pieter, 99 Van den Wale, Kateline, 117 Van den Wallekijne (Wallekine), Kateline, 51 Jan, 51, 75 Van den Wielkine, Amelberghe, 100 Mergriete, 100 Van den Wijngaerde, Bette, 116–17 Van den Winkele, Everaerd, 64–5 Van der Beke, Dierin, 107 Van der Caerden, wife of Lieven, 85 Van der Damme, Arnold, 106 Pieter, 106–8 Van der Eeke, Lijsbette, 69 Lodewik, 107 Van der Hasselt, 75 Van der Joden, Soy, 85 Van der Lake, Willem, 70 Van der Maerct (De Mercato?), Jacob, 84 Van der Most, Lijsbette, 145 Van der Pale, Alise, 53, 86 Gillis, 5, 86 Van der Sluus, 97 Van der Wostinen, Jan, 93, 95–6 Van Eeke, Mergriete, 125 Robrecht, 53 Van Eerzele, Yden, 85 Van Erleghem, Lijsbette, 141 Willem, 141 Van Gavere, Jan, 75 Van Ghend, Mergriete, 97–8 Van Halen, see De Mirabello Van Hoerdeghem, Lievin, 54 Van Hoese, Heinric, 96 Van Horne, Arnold, 72 Van Lemberghem, Lijsbette, 89 Mergriete, 89 Van Lierde, Lijsbette, 70–8, 145, 152 Van Lovendeghem, Bertram, 75 Jacob, 107–8 Mergriete, wife of Jacob, 107–8 Van Massemine, Gherard, 55 Philip, 72 Van Menine, Mergriete, 55–6, 144

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM

240

IN DEX

Van Oedonc, Heinric, 110 Van Oestende, noble family of, 92–4 Gherard, 92–4 Isabelle, 92–4, 152 Van Oesterzele, Heinric, 39–40 Kateline, wife of Heinric, 39–40 Van Omelroden, Lievin, 107 Van Oterghem, Clais, 55 Van Overdwater, Avezoete, 99 Jacob, 99 Van Smettelede, Jacob, 84 Kateline, widow of Jacob, 84 Van Sotteghem, Lijsbette, 57 Van Steeland, Lijsbette, 140 Mergriete, 139–40 Van Vaernewijc (Varnewijc) noble family of, 28 Volcwijf, 70 Ywein, 72 Van Vinderhoute, Boudin, 107 Aechte wife of Wouter, 106–11, 146 Wouter, 106–11, 146 Van Wondelghem, Ghiselbrecht, 35–6 Van Zele, Jacob, 99 Mergriete, wife of Zegher, 99 Zegher, 99 Venice, 6 vinders, see arbiters violence, 17–18, 22–5, 29 Vogheleest, Jan, 51–2 Vossaerds, Kateline, 99 Walraven, Jan, in the Kwaadham, 51 Wapensmedere, Gillis de, 40 war, see Hundred Years’ War warp-winding, 107–12 weavers guild, 125 dominance of elites in, 18, 21, 28–9, 105 leading role in wool cloth production, 17–21, 109–10, 117 as a Member of Ghent, 22 political role of, 24–5

9780230104952_12_ind.indd 240

Westrem, Jan, 55 wholesalers, cloth, 109 widowers, 30, 37, 72, 76, 140 widows, 7–8, 10–11, 30, 36–7, 41, 44, 49–53, 55–6, 59–62, 65–6, 68–74, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 84–5, 89–94, 97, 99, 110, 112–13, 117, 120, 124, 126, 128–9, 132–4, 142, 144, 148–50 Willaens, Jan, 97 Lijsbette, wife of Jan, 97 wills, 38 Witman, widow of Macharijs, 40–1 witnesses, women as, 30, 146 Wittebaerds, Mergriete, 100 wives, see married women Wives with Husbands category, 42–5, 48 women, 21, 30–3 legal capability of, 36, 38–9, 42–9, 106–8, 138–9 see also married women; single women; widows wool from England, 20, 24 wool cloth production, distribution at middling, retail level, 115–18 structures and recession in Ghent, 18–24 women’s employment opportunities in, 32, 104–12 work, 103–20 identities, 113 tension over location and supervision of women’s, 103–5, 132–4 women’s access to occupations, 6–7, 18, 104–12, 115 see also names of individual crafts Wray, Shona Kelly, 148 Ypres, 19, 23, 38 Zels, Mergriete, 99 Zomergem, 71

2/10/2011 12:39:31 PM