- The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians
- Gender and The Christian Traditions
- Jewish Traditions About Women and Gender Roles: From Rabbinic Teachings to Medieval Practice
- Women and Gender in Islamic Traditions
- The Political Traditions of Female Rulership in Medieval Europe
- Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions
- Women and Laws in Early Medieval Europe
- Conflicts Over Gender in Civic Courts
- Later Medieval Law in Community Context
- Brideprice, Dowry, and other Marital Assigns
- Women and Gender in Canon Law
- Gendering Demographic Change in the Middle Ages
- Genders and Material Culture
- Gender and Daily Life in Jewish Communities
- Carolingian Domesticities
- Public and Private Space and Gender in Medieval Europe
- Pious Domesticities
- Slavery
- Urban Economies
- Rural Economies
- Aristocratic Economies: Women and Family
- Caring for Gendered Bodies
- The Byzantine Body
- Same-sex Possibilities
- Performing Courtliness
- Gender and the Initial Christianization of Northern Europe (to 1000 CE)
- The Gender of the Religious: Wo/Men and the Invention of Monasticism
- Women and Reform in the Central Middle Ages
- Devoted Holiness in the Lay World
- Cults of Saints
- Heresy and Gender in the Middle Ages
- Cultures of Devotion
- The Bride of Christ, the “Male Woman,” and the Female Reader in Late Antiquity
- Gender at the Medieval Millennium
- Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism
- Toward the Witch Craze
- Towards Feminism: Christine De Pizan, Female Advocacy, and Women’s Textual Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This essay examines the economic activities and "work" of aristocratic women, c.1000–c.1400. Despite the limitations posed by law, custom, and social expectation, women played a central role in preserving and transferring family wealth through marriage, gifts, and inheritance. They were equally crucial in matters of household and estate management. Both older and recent scholarship explores the complexity of the woman's experience within the European family. Her role was neither rigidly static nor in perpetual flux. The diversity of a woman's economic responsibilities and her influence in the family reveal the inherent flexibility of the medieval family, once considered staunchly patriarchal. While some have argued that the patrilineal descent group was narrowing in this period, medieval families devised strategies to preserve the integrity of their holdings and to provide for a range of kin, regardless of gender.
Keywords: family, aristocracy, work, economy, inheritance, marriage, household, patrilineage, dowry, estate management
Joanna Drell, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians
- Gender and The Christian Traditions
- Jewish Traditions About Women and Gender Roles: From Rabbinic Teachings to Medieval Practice
- Women and Gender in Islamic Traditions
- The Political Traditions of Female Rulership in Medieval Europe
- Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions
- Women and Laws in Early Medieval Europe
- Conflicts Over Gender in Civic Courts
- Later Medieval Law in Community Context
- Brideprice, Dowry, and other Marital Assigns
- Women and Gender in Canon Law
- Gendering Demographic Change in the Middle Ages
- Genders and Material Culture
- Gender and Daily Life in Jewish Communities
- Carolingian Domesticities
- Public and Private Space and Gender in Medieval Europe
- Pious Domesticities
- Slavery
- Urban Economies
- Rural Economies
- Aristocratic Economies: Women and Family
- Caring for Gendered Bodies
- The Byzantine Body
- Same-sex Possibilities
- Performing Courtliness
- Gender and the Initial Christianization of Northern Europe (to 1000 CE)
- The Gender of the Religious: Wo/Men and the Invention of Monasticism
- Women and Reform in the Central Middle Ages
- Devoted Holiness in the Lay World
- Cults of Saints
- Heresy and Gender in the Middle Ages
- Cultures of Devotion
- The Bride of Christ, the “Male Woman,” and the Female Reader in Late Antiquity
- Gender at the Medieval Millennium
- Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism
- Toward the Witch Craze
- Towards Feminism: Christine De Pizan, Female Advocacy, and Women’s Textual Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond
- Index
