This book offers a comparative perspective on Northern and Southern European laws and customs concerning women’s property and economic rights. By focusing on both Northern and Southern European societies, these studies analyse the consequences of different juridical frameworks and norms on the development of the economic roles of men and women.

This volume is divided into three parts. The first, Laws, presents general outlines related to some European regions; the second, Family strategies or marital economies?, questions the potential conflict between the economic interests of the married couple and those of the lineage within the nobility; finally, the third part of the book, Inside the urban economy, focuses on economic and work activities of middle and lower classes in the urban environment. The assorted and rich panorama offered by the history of the legislation on women’s economic rights shows that similarities and differences run through Europe in such a way that the North/South model looks very stereotyped. While this approach calls into question classical geographical and cultural maps and well-established chronologies, it encourages a reconsideration of European history according to a cross-boundaries perspective.

By drawing on a wide range of social, economic and cultural European contexts, from the late medieval to early modern age to the nineteenth century, and including the middle and lower classes (especially artisans, merchants and traders) as well as the economic practices and norms of the upper middle class and aristocracy, this book will be of interest to economic and social historians, sociologists of health, gender and sexuality, and economists.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |27 pages
Introduction. North versus South – gender, law and economic well-being in Europe in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries
By Anna Bellavitis and Beatrice Zucca Micheletto

part I | 77 pages
Laws

chapter 1|16 pages
Community of goods, coverture and capability in Britain. Scotland versus England
By Deborah Simonton

chapter 2|15 pages
Between parental power and marital authority
How merchant women stood the test of customary laws in Brittany in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries
By Nicole Dufournaud

chapter 3|15 pages
Exceptional women. Female merchants and working women in Italy in the early modern period
By Simona Feci

chapter 4|14 pages
Married women’s property rights in the nineteenth century in France and Spain. A North–South case study
By Marion Röwekamp

chapter 5|15 pages
From legal diversity to centralization. Marriage and wealth in nineteenth-century Greece
By Evdoxios Doxiadis

part II | 57 pages
Family strategies or marital economies?

chapter 6|12 pages
Marriage, law and property. Married noblewomen’s role in property management in fifteenth-century Norway
By Susann Anett Pedersen

chapter 7|15 pages
Class privileges and the public good. The monti dei maritaggi in early modern Naples
By Vittoria Fiorelli

chapter 8|13 pages
Women of high- and medium-ranking officers in the Île-de-France between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What economic agency?
By Claire Chatelain

chapter 9|15 pages
Undivided brothers – renouncing sisters. Family strategies of low nobility in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tyrol
By Siglinde Clementi

part III | 107 pages
Inside the urban economy

chapter 10|16 pages
The ‘egalitarian trend’ in practice. Female participation in capital markets in late medieval Leuven
By Andrea Bardyn

chapter 11|17 pages
Women and credit in eighteenth-century Venice. A preliminary analysis
By Matteo Pompermaier

chapter 12|15 pages
Married women, property and paraphernalia in early modern Scotland
By Rebecca Mason

chapter 13|13 pages
Women at work in a Southern European town. Women, guilds and commercial partnerships in Venice in the sixteenth century
By Emilie Fiorucci

chapter 14|14 pages
Law, wives and the marital economy in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Bridging the gap between theory and practice
By Kaat Cappelle

chapter 15|12 pages
Women, law and business formation in early modern Paris
By Janine M. Lanza

chapter 16|18 pages
Bankruptcies, a gateway to gender history. The example of women book traders in Paris in the nineteenth century
By Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin