The Medieval Podcast Behind the Mic

Episode 186:
Women’s Work in Catalonia

There are a whole lot of myths about women in the Middle Ages: they were demure, they had no rights, and their only function in society was domestic, to name a few. The more we learn about medieval women, however, the more we see a complex and familiar picture emerging.

Although women were the primary caregivers of young children, and were responsible for many domestic chores, they were also savvy businesspeople, as Dr. Sarah Ifft Decker explained on this episode of the podcast.

For her book, The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities*, Sarah traced thousands of notarial contracts from what is now northeastern Spain, and her research demonstrates women’s roles in investing, buying and selling real estate, managing properties, and (my favourite) taking on girls as apprentices.

Of the formal apprenticeship contracts Sarah discovered in her survey, all were Christian: Jewish women and girls didn’t enter into these formal agreements in this particular time and place, although (as she points out) Jewish women were skilled workers in their own right, especially in the textile arts, which they likely learned at home instead of in the context of formal training.

That parents would send their girls out - even to other towns, as in one example from The Fruit of Her Hands - to learn a trade seems like something far beyond modern expectations for what women were both permitted and encouraged to do at the time, and speaks to the simplicity of the modern narrative around medieval women’s lives. As Marion Turner pointed out in her episode on The Wife of Bath, working women were an absolutely normal part of life in the medieval world. The fact that these parents also went so far as to enter into (and pay for) notarial contracts to ensure that their girls would be well treated demonstrates that girls were cared for by their parents. They weren’t just pawns in the marriage market: they were precious children.

Depiction of women in the Sarajevo Haggadah, Wikimedia Commons

In addition to apprenticeships, Sarah elaborates on the roles of Jewish and Christian women (yes, both) in moneylending, contributing important new research to the topic of loans and interfaith relations in the Middle Ages. Since moneylending has been a focal point for antisemitic stereotypes for many centuries, it’s always important to pay attention to historians’ careful research, and what the evidence actually says. If for no other reason, this episode is well worth a listen (and the book is worth a read!).

For a(nother) quick look at Jewish women in medieval Spain, check out this overview by Renee Levine Melammed for the Jewish Women’s Archive. For more on women’s work, Christians, and Jews (this time in England), have a listen to my podcast episode with Adrienne Williams Boyarin. And for more from Sarah Ifft Decker, check out her podcast, Media-eval: A Medieval Pop Culture Podcast.

* Amazon book links on this website are affiliate links, meaning that anything you buy on Amazon through these links helps me fund my work as an indie historian. Thanks!