Gendering Money. How Women and Men Used Coin in Eleventh-Century Northern Italy

Abstract

How Women and Men Used Coin in Eleventh-Century Northern ItalyHistories of work and histories of women have revealed ways in which gender has been essential to the shaping and organization of economic activity in past societies.For late medi eval and early modern Europe, there is now a rich and sophisticated literature which restores the economic centrality of women's labour, whether for the household or for wider exchange networks.But these are subjects in earlier medi eval Europe (c.500-1100) which still await much deeper exploration, a task made more difficult by a written source base which only rarely or obliquely speaks of them.Surprisingly little has been written on the gendering of the economy in the period before c. 1100 since David Herlihy's 1990 survey of women's work or Constance Berman's later essays, although osteoarchaeo logy is one field where new clues marked on the bones of the dead are revealing the different ways in which men and women worked across space and time. 1 Despite the challenges presented by the sources, scholars need to find creative approaches to texts and the material evidence, or at the very least provide working models, as gender structured work and exchange no less decisively in the post-Roman world than it did before or after.To understand the role it played in patterning economic activity requires writing the history of women's labour in social reproduction, as care workers and houseworkers, alongside the historically varied ways in which production for exchange (commercial or otherwise) was carried out by women.But these histories also raise a further problem which is even more rarely studied in this period: exchange practices, as well as labour, were also gendered.The questions of who buys and sells, gives and receives, takes and * This research was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. 1 Herlihy, Opera Muliebria; Berman, 'Women's Work in Family, Village, and Town'; and Berman, 'Gender at the Medi eval Millennium' .For approaches and biblio graphy in the later medi eval period: Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters; McIntosh, Working Women in English Society; Hailwood and Whittle, 'The Gender Division of Labour in Early Modern England'; and Whittle, ' A Critique of Approaches to "Domestic Work"' .

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