Abstract
For the past several years, the role of women as investors, creditors, and debtors in medieval and early modern European society has garnered an increasing amount of attention from scholars such as Amy Froide, Julie Hardwick, Margaret Hunt, Amy Erickson, and Sheilagh Ogilvie. Drawing from economic history, gender analysis, and cultural history, scholars have researched how women utilized informal and formal investment opportunities, as well as women lenders and borrowers in both institutional and extralegal contexts. This intersection of approaches informs the essays in Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe, edited by Elise M. Dermineur, which brings together contributions from fourteen scholars of late medieval and early modern Europe. The result is a rich variety of essays on women and credit not only in early modern England, which has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, but also Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The volume provides a broad overview of women’s involvement in credit networks at local and national levels over the course of several centuries. Although patterns and opportunities differed by location and time period, the general sense one gets is that not only were women more heavily involved in different kinds of credit relationships than we might at first expect, but their overall contribution to the functioning of the broader European economy has been greatly underestimated by historians. Women not only worked and earned money, but a surprising number also borrowed and loaned money to others in both formal and informal ways. The impact and significance of these activities are the general focus of the book.
Questions surrounding women’s role in credit and borrowing inform a variety of different areas of study in the volume, particularly the law as cultural practice. A number of the chapters demonstrate that legal codes regarding women, property, inheritance, and marriage often did not align with actual practices. For example, many of the essays explore women’s utilization of law courts in England to recover debts, which was a process that most married women should not have had access to. In England by the Late Middle Ages, according to the laws of coverture, married women were not supposed to be able to act on their own in this regard; technically speaking, all assets and property belonged to the husband. But contributions from Matthew Frank Stevens, Teresa Phipps, Juliet Gayton, and Margaret Hunt demonstrate significant local and chronological variation when it came to the practical implementation of coverture, each highlighting the “fiction of coverture” as a totalizing system (Gayton’s words, p. 146). For example, Teresa Phipps’s essay, “Creditworthy Women and Town Courts in Late Medieval England” explores court records from fourteenth-century Nottingham, Chester, and Winchester involving women in commercial and credit transactions. She discovered fairly significant variations among the three towns when it came to married women and their participation in or instigation of such court cases. For example, in Nottingham, women’s interests as creditors were often represented in cases filed jointly with their husbands, whereas in the two other towns, joint suits were much less common. Phipps also shows that sometimes husbands and wives were held jointly accountable for debts they had accrued, whereas in other places only the husband was held liable, with the Nottingham courts apparently allowing more flexibility for married women than the courts in Chester and Winchester. Such evidence reveals that while it was generally true in England that unmarried women, including widows, likely had more freedom when it came to negotiating issues surrounding credit and property, married women were not always subject to the total legal authority of their husbands. The varied implementation of coverture law is just one area where uncovering the specific role of women as borrowers and creditors in different locations and institutional settings reveals a far more nuanced situation than a straightforward study of contemporary legal codes and religious and prescriptive literature might suggest, for example.
Other chapters explore questions of trust and security, concepts intimately connected to understandings of credit in the early modern world. Maria Ågren’s essay, “Providing Security for Others: Swedish Women in Early Modern Credit Networks,” explores how people deemed not creditworthy (and therefore lacked “trust”) nonetheless were able to establish security and gain access to credit via other people. The article focuses on women who served as providers of security for such people. Ågren argues that in contrast to England, evidence from Sweden suggests that wives and widows, rather than never married women, were far more likely to be involved in credit and debt relationships. In Sweden, married women often “stood in” for those less creditworthy than themselves in order to facilitate loans and extensions of credit. One of Ågren’s main contributions is to emphasize the role of coercion when it came to women as not only debtors but also as creditors. She uncovered cases in which individual creditors had likely been pressured into lending money or property to others. Women servants seemed particularly susceptible to this form of intimidation, which brings into question the idea of choice among such individuals. Ågren ends the essay with a consideration of how credit worked at the Bank of Sweden in the late 1600s and argues that similar kinds of credit relationships existed at the Bank, with both pawning and “standing in” for others as allowable common practices.
Another intriguing essay is Eve Rosenshaft’s “Gold, Ink, and Tears: The Hazards of Credit and the Indebted Widow in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” which explores how one widow in the Holy Roman Empire dealt with the problem of indebtedness through a close examination of her surviving letters. The widow in question, Eve König, came from a prosperous merchant background and found herself managing significant silk factory holdings in Vienna after the unexpected death of her husband. She also inherited his substantial debts. Rosenshaft shows that König had to negotiate difficult relationships and transactions, often with a steep learning curve, and that how she and others perceived her financial competence shaped her decisions. König remained highly dependent upon the men in her life, including a friend with whom she shared a correspondence and eventually a marriage, Gotthold Lessing, her brother Johann Georg, as well as her brother-in-law, with whom she had a fraught relationship. Eventually she followed her brother’s advice to get an “independent” financial adviser who served as her business agent. According to Rosenshaft, the apparent relief König felt at being discharged of such stressful responsibilities revealed the multiple meanings of “friend” and how it took on a more commercial if not capitalist connotation, rather than a purely sentimental one, during the early modern period.
One of the overarching questions that some of the essays attempt to address is the question of female empowerment: to what extent did women’s involvement in networks of credit provide them with increased opportunities to own property, for example, or to act independently? The volume’s editor, Elise Dermineur, explores these questions in her essay, “Credit, Strategies, and Female Empowerment in Early Modern France.” As the author concedes, this is difficult to analyze because contemporaries did not utilize or articulate such a concept. Dermineur argues, “the notion of ‘pre-industrial empowerment’ implied a transformative dimension, a change in the distribution or application of power. It was an improvement of one’s situation, a challenge in a certain power dynamic” (p. 271). Still, this is very difficult to measure from the existing records. Dermineur’s essay reveals how both married and single women in eighteenth-century France seemed to challenge the existing patriarchal legal and financial systems through such actions as acknowledging shared debt with a spouse or extending credit to male relatives. This is an intriguing argument, but the extent to which such interactions and decisions actually benefited women as a group is, of course, difficult to ascertain; one wonders about the question of coercion, for example, brought up so persuasively in Ågren’s chapter. Nonetheless, like the “fiction of coverture” described in the essays about England, married and single women in early modern France negotiated credit and debt relationships in surprising and complex ways, which sometimes seemed to result in a challenge to cultural and legal expectations and traditions.
One of the drawbacks to a collection like this, with contributions that cover a wide range of centuries and places, is the potential for a lack of focus and context. And indeed, there are moments in the collection where more context and explicit connections among the chapters would be helpful. But overall, this is an impressive compilation of essays that reflects the important intersections of cultural, legal, and economic history and method that persuasively demonstrates the crucial role women played in lending and borrowing in pre-industrial Europe.