This article analyses the economic activities of urban Flemish women in actual practice, using contracts and court judgements from the mid-fourteenth-century registers of the aldermen of Ghent. These ‘acts’ show that women routinely invested and managed their own property without male representatives and that distinctions of marital status were often far less significant in medieval Ghent than elsewhere in northern Europe. Another conceptualization of the scope of women's economic activity also existed at the time, in which men acted for women, but it was not the dominant norm in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent.
ABSTRACT:In the earliest centuries of the Flemish wool cloth industry, the lower-level, preparatory stage of wool processing and spinning was organized by a form of ‘putting-out’ significantly different from later forms in the industry. It took place in and around the cities or smaller drapery centres rather than in rural areas, and women were prominent as middle-level organizers, managers and small entrepreneurs, despite their marginal status in or exclusion from the craft guilds. Using small bits of evidence from Flemish regulations and contracts from the earliest documented period of cloth production, this article analyses lower-level organization through the lens of gender. It shows that the production of yarn was organized by a broad middling level of drapers and small marketsellers, who were women, men and husbands and wives working together. The gendered lens distinguishes this middle level, which was indispensable to the efficient production of wool cloth in medieval Flanders.
On 16 October 1349, two parties reached an agreement to exchange properties from the estate of the deceased Pieter van Overtwater. The first party was his mother, identified as <<.! oncvrouw Kateline, mother of Pieter van Overtwater,» and the second was <
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.