070132 SE BA-Seminar - Gender and the City. Gender Relations in Medieval Towns and Cities (2022S)

In this seminar we will investigate the complexity of living together in medieval towns and cities with a special focus on gender relations. Between ca 1050 and 1300 the European continent saw a constant and rapid urban development. Although major capitals stand out (Paris, London, Rome; Italian city-states like Venice, Genoa and Florence, and their Northern European counterparts like Bruges or Ghent), the size of European urban growth between ca 1050 and ca 1300 is impressive everywhere. Importantly, however, the largest number of urban dwellers by far lived in small towns with 2,000-5,000 inhabitants, especially outside the Mediterranean area. Market functions and trade relations were a key feature of urban settlements. Depending on their geographical location, migration both from the countryside and from distant places was a distinctive feature of medieval urbanity.

Diversity and social heterogeneity were defining elements for towns and cities across the continent. Ways of belonging to and in medieval towns and cities were multiple and varied from region to region. Cities were political communities, their actions based on consensus within socio-political and legal elites who developed specific forms and symbols of corporate agency. Yet, urban space embraced various groups related to each other both in hierarchical and in more egalitarian ways. These novel approaches also highlight the active involvement of women in a wide range of societal fields: they acted independently and as partners in diverse legal and economic transactions, as heads of religious houses, and brokers within family relations.

Recent studies have collected rich evidence from legal and economic sources, from documents of practice, as well as from visual and material culture, to underline the variety of bonds between individual actors ranging from merchants with wide reaching commercial networks to ordinary craftspeople, and the partly different, partly comparable roles of men and women within these networks. Corporate and individual urban identities were placed within a web of bonds: family and business networks, place of origin and legal status, personal property, education and occupation, linguistic and religious affiliations.

Public performances of power and decision-making as well as religious processions (both recorded in historiographical sources) convey an idea of how identities could be created through repeated acts of identification and differentiation. Archival sources from many European regions show women and men in many legal transactions. They make visible how social bonds were negotiated by exchanging property – among individuals and institutions, spouses and next of kin, but also in-laws and servants of both genders.

In this seminar we will investigate the roles of women in their relations and interactions with their male and female relatives and members of their peer groups and various esp. religious institutions. The focus of our joint work will be on medieval Vienna; comparative perspectives will include Central and Wester European towns and cities.