Abstract
In all the various divisions of labor along gender lines in the history of the western world, one set of connections appears with great consistency: the association of women with the maintenance of the household through feeding and clothing its members. This is sometimes termed reproductive, as opposed to productive, labor. These connections appear in distinctive ways in the Middle Ages. When households began to acquire their food and clothing on the market rather than producing it themselves—a shift connected with the urbanization of the central Middle Ages—this changed the significance of this work for medieval understandings of gender. It seems to have changed the significance of textile work less, however, than victualling. As changing economic conditions and technological developments altered the production and distribution of cloth so that men took it over on a commercial basis, cloth production remained a respectable and even prestigious occupation for women. It was especially respected as work for married women as part of their responsibility for their households. The continuing connection of women with textile production demonstrates that the cultural importance of an activity is not always a function of its economic importance. It also reminds us that production outside the market remained important during the Middle Ages and that cultural representations may provide us with clues to this where guild and tax records do not.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Notes
For this debate, see Judith M. Bennett, “‘History that Stands Still’: Women’s Work in the European Past,” Feminist Studies 14 (1986): 269–83;
Bridget Hill, “Women’s History: A Study in Change, Continuity or Standing Still?” Women’s History Review 2 (1993): 5–23;
Martha Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Sarah B. Pomeroy Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Shocken, 1975), p. 30.
John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 68.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (New York: W W. Norton, 1994), pp. 281–2.
David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), pp. 77–91.
On embroidery see Nancy A. Jones, “The Uses of Embroidery in the Romances of Jean Renart: Gender, History, Textuality” in Nancy Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), pp. 13–44.
René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot, ed., Le livre des métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1879).
Alexander Neckam, De Naturis rerum, ch. 171, ed. Thomas Wright, Rerum Britannicam Medii Aevi Scriptores 34 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863), p. 281.
Arsène Darmesteter and D. S. Blondheim, Les gloses françaises dans les commentaires talmudiques de Raschi (Paris: Champion, 1929), no. 1089, 1:150.
A. R. Bridbury Medieval English Clothmaking: An Economic Survey (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 1–3.
Dominique Cardon, La Draperie au Moyen Âge: Essor d’une grande industrie européenne (Paris: CNRS, 1999), p. 545.
Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years After Marian K. Dale,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989): 474–501.
Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 31.
Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 21–22;
Kay Lacey, “The Production of ‘Narrow Ware’ by Silkwomen in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century England,” Textile History 18 (1981): 187–204;
John of Garland, Dictionarius, in A Volume of Vocabularies, ed. Thomas Wright (Liverpool: D. Marples and Co., 1882), pp. 134–35.
P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 82–157, esp. pp. 120–21, noting that women tended to be in the lowest-skilled and lowest-paid branches of the textile trade.
Wakefield examples listed in J. W Walker, Wakefield: Its History and People, 3rd edition (Wakefield: S. R. Publishers Ltd., 1966), 2:386–88. Johannes Brugman, Vita posterior beatae Lidwinae virginis, 2:4, AASS vol. 11 p. 323 and ff.
Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 134–60, esp. p. 139;
Helgi Porlâksson, “Arbeidskvinnens, särlig veverskens, öknomiske stilling på Island I middelalderen,” in Kvinnans ekonomiska ställning under nordisk medeltid, ed. Hedda Gunneng and Birgit Strand (Lindome, Sweden: Kompendiet, 1981), pp. 50–65;
Nanna Damsholt, “The Role of Icelandic Women in the Sagas and in the Production of Homespun Cloth,” Scandinavian Journal of History 9 (1984): 81–87.
Walter Endrei, L’Evolution des techniques du filage et du tissage du Moyen Age à la révolution industrielle, trans. Joseph Takacs (Paris: Mouton, 1968), p. 38;
Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York: Oxford, 1996), p. 54.
Peter Schuster, Das Frauenhaus: Städtische Bordelle in Deutschland (1350–1600) (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992), p. 109.
Fols 60r, 166v, 193r, in Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 299–300, 219, 221.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, “General Prologue,” ll. 446–47, Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 30.
William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 5:213–16, p. 319.
Christine de Pisan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, 2:10, ed. Charity Cannon Willard and Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1989), p. 156.
Quoted in Merry E. Wiesner, “Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing Production,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 191.
Gert Kreytenberg, “The Sculptures of the Fourteenth Century,” in Cristina Acidini Luchinari, ed., The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, trans. Anthony Brierly (Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1994), 2:73–156, fig. 19.
Dennis A. Chevalley, Der Dom zu Augsburg (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), p. 139, fig. 242;
Robert L. Wyss, “Die Handarbeiten der Maria: Eine Ikonographische Studie unter Berücksichtigung der Textilentechniken,” in Artes Minores, ed. Michael Stettier and Mechthild Lemberg (Bern: Stampili & Cie., 1973), pp. 114–55, pls. 1–5, 18–22.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 158–61.
E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 116–50 discusses the Old French text. The story is known in other versions and vernaculars as well;
Francesca Bray Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 183–272.
G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 291, on the history of this saying.
Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 109–50.
Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 149.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2004 E. Jane Burns
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Karras, R.M. (2004). “This Skill in a Woman is By No Means to Be Despised”. In: Burns, E.J. (eds) Medieval Fabrications. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09675-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09675-3_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6187-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-09675-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)