Abstract
Money makes things happen, as Daniel Murtaugh cogently notes in his study of Old French fabliau. It is an important motive force for economic, political, and personal power. But money in its concrete quantifiable form—pennies, pounds, florins, reíais, maravedís, and livres—is just the starting point for a study of gender and the sociology of economics in Europe in the Middle Ages. The authors whose essays are collected in this book emphasize that in the complex and subtle intersection of women and money, the question was not a simple calculus of how women got money and spent it, but also what money meant in terms of human values and morals. Their questions revolve on the nexus of work, commerce, and power but they use money to illuminate the operations of gender in the power structures, social conflicts, and cultural traditions, how wealth was experienced by women, and the subtle shifts in meaning of abstract notions of wealth.1
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Notes
For the classical formulation of wealth, see Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: The Modern Library, 1943). For an overview of medieval Christian attitudes toward money and wealth, see Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) made the decisive turn to modern economics as a quantitative inquiry based on monetary indices of income (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1979);
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York and London: Norton, 1990);
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972);
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, 1200–1320 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A. D. 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and
John Day, The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
John W. Baldwin, “The Medieval Theories of the Just Price,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 49:4 (1959): 1–94 (rpt. in Pre-Capitalist Economic Thought, New York: Arno, 1972);
Jacques LeGoff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (New York: Zone, 1990).
Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1550 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1987);
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973);
Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, 3rd edition (New York: Norton, 1994);
Robert S. Lopez, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955);
Harry A. Miskimin, Cash, Credit and Crisis in Europe, 1300–1600 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1989);
Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, trans. I. E. Clegg (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanvich, 1956; first French edition 1933).
Norman John Greville Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe, second edition (London: Longman, 1994);
Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003).
Alice Clark’s The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth-Century (New York: Dutton, 1919) focused on a later period and is older but still useful.
Important newer works include Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London: Croom Helm, 1985);
Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986);
Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in hate Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);
Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the how Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
David Herlihy, Opera Muliehria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990);
Madeleine Peiner Cosman, Women at Work in Medieval Europe (New York: Facts on File, 2000).
The classic study of women and gilds, Marian Dale, “The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 4:3 (October 1933): 324–35,
was revisited by Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith Bennett in “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14:2 (Winter 1989): 474–88.
For the transition from late medieval to early modern Europe, see Carol L. Loats, “Gender, Guilds, and Work Identity: Perspectives from Sixteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 20:1 (Winter 1997): 15–30;
Merry Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); and
Daryl M. Hafter, ed., European Women and Preindustrial Craft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993);
Sally McKee, “Women under Venetian Colonial Rule in the Early Renaissance: Observations on Their Economic Activities,” Renaissance Quarterly 51:1 (Spring 1998): 34–67;
Kathryn Reyerson, Business, Banking and Commerce in Medieval Montpellier (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985);
Reyerson, The Art of the Deal: Intermediaries of Trade in Medieval Montpellier (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
See, for example, Susan Mosher Stuard, “Marriage Gifts and Fashion Mischief,” in The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy, ed. Sherry Roush and Cristelle L. Baskins, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 299 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 169–85;
Sarah-Grace Heller, “Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance in Thirteenth-Century Sumptuary Laws and the Roman de la rose,” French Historical Studies 27:2 (2004): 311–48.
Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak, “Bargaining and Distribution in Marriage,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10:4 (1996): 139–58.
Martha C. Howell, “The Gender of Europe’s Commercial Economy, 1200–1700,” Gender and History 20:3 (November 2008): 519–38, quotes on pp. 520 and 532.
Women who engaged in physical labor carried a stigma akin to prostitution. On the economic implications of prostitution, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and
Joëlle Rollo-Koster, “From Prostitutes to Brides of Christ: The Avignonese Repenties in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32:1 (2002): 109–44.
Cary Nederman and Martin Morris, “Rhetoric, Violence, and Gender in Machiavelli,” in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 267–86.
Jack L. Amariglio, “The Body, Economic Discourse, and Power: An Economist’s Introduction to Foucault,” History of Political Economy, 20:4 (Winter 1988): 583–613.
Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter hiving: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Sheila Delany, “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 71–87.
On the economics of religion and intercession, see also Katherine L. French, “Maidens’ Lights and Wives’ Stores: Women’s Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England,” Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies 29:2 (Summer 1998): 399–425.
See also Therese Martin, “The Art of a Reigning Queen as Dynastic Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain,” Speculum 80:4 (October 2005): 1134–71.
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© 2010 Theresa Earenfight
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Earenfight, T. (2010). Introduction. In: Earenfight, T. (eds) Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106017_1
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