| In late medieval Ghent, the second-largest city in northern Europe, unwritten customary law and cultural practices allowed women a much wider scope of economic enterprise than in many other areas of medieval Europe. Gender and work in medieval Flemish cities has been neglected, despite the fact that practices in Ghent have implications for urban centers throughout the Low Countries, France and Germany. Sources of actual practice, the contracts preserved in the annual registers of the aldermen who ruled the city, show that women were principals in sales of property, management of investments, and moneylending, without male representation, in one-quarter of the legal acts recorded from 1339 through 1361. These findings call into question received notions that the legal incapability of married women limited and interrupted their economic lives. In Ghent, marital status did not determine women's economic lives, which were relatively continuous and shaped more by their own choices. The unwritten body of oral custom, administered by the aldermen, allowed some married women, as well as single women and widows, legal capability because they owned immovable property in their own names. Women claimed that right by publicly performing the management of their property before the aldermen. Most men accepted women's economic activities as necessary and beneficial to the family and household, and their support was crucial, but not uncontested. There was a competing patrimonial system, originating in rural landholding practices and noble culture, which aimed at reserving management of property for men and eventually undermined the customary access of women to the economy.; This dissertation analyzes the activities of women in the property markets, moneylending and credit, and craft production and distribution. Women were often buyers and sellers in the urban property market and especially in the annuities markets, but they almost never invested in rural land. There were many women producers and marketsellers who owned and operated their own businesses. Women were significant moneylenders for both small amounts and large loans which circulated their wealth through the commercial economy and made it available for capital formation. |
