Beyond North and South: Comparing Structures and Women's Investments in Ghent and Genoa

This paper compares the investment activities – legal acts and contracts involving credit, annuities, and property management - of women in fourteenth-century Ghent (north) and thirteenth-century Genoa (south).  This topic crosses the historiographical divide of northern and southern pre-modern Europe which separates northern women, who were allowed to run businesses and manage property as widows (or single women) but not as married women, from southern women, who had to submit to guardianship of a husband or male relative.  Comparison of Ghent and Genoa contradicts this dichotomy, because Genoese married women signed contracts, loaned money, and managed property, as deputies of their husbands who were travelling merchants. Genoese legal and economic structures not only allowed but enabled women to invest and manage capital.  In Ghent, women managed property, loaned money, and signed contracts in their own names, as deputies of their husbands and as owners of family property.  Under Ghent custom, inheritance was completely partible, which meant that a woman from a prosperous family inherited an equal share of her parent’s property.  Widows and singlewomen older than twenty-five were not subject to the authority of parents or guardians, and married women were often allowed to perform legal acts. I will argue that Ghent and Genoa, as pre-eminent proto-industrial cities, should not be considered exceptional, but rather indicate that local structures and economic needs were just as significant as regional norms in determining the extent of opportunities available for women’s investments.