Women and Work in Premodern Europe

Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation, c. 1100-1800

Author: Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell and Julie Hotchin

By exploring the array of meanings attributed to work for and by women, this volume re-evaluates concepts and experiences of work as sites of social, economic and cultural production in which women’s identities were created and performed.

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Summary

Description

This book re-evaluates and extends understandings about how work was conceived and what it could entail for women in the premodern period in Europe from c. 1100 to c. 1800. It does this by building on the impressive growth in literature on women’s working experiences, and by adopting new interpretive approaches that expand received assumptions about what constituted 'work' for women. While attention to the diversity of women’s contributions to the economy has done much to make the breadth of women’s experiences of labour visible, this volume takes a more expansive conceptual approach to the notion of work and considers the social and cultural dimensions in which activities were construed and valued as work. This interdisciplinary collection thus advances concepts of work that encompass cultural activities in addition to more traditional economic understandings of work as employment or labour for production. The chapters reconceptualise and explore work for women by asking how the working lives of historical women were enacted and represented, and analyse the relationships that shaped women’s experiences of work across the European premodern period.

About the Author

Merridee L. Bailey is a social and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern England. She is an Associate Member of the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

Tania M. Colwell specialises in the socio-cultural history of late medieval France and England. She is a visiting fellow in the School of History at the Australian National University, and an Honorary Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Julie Hotchin is a religious and cultural historian of medieval Europe. She is a visiting fellow in the School of History at the Australian National University, and an Honorary Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.