Hindered but Essential: Women and Craftsmanship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Venice

Although no separate women's guilds existed in Venice during the Renaissance, the historiography shows that women - be they widows, wives, mothers, or young girls - worked in professions related to the guilds. Indeed, the statutes of various Venetian guilds - which have seldom been studied from a gendered perspective - did not prevent women from enrolling; some of them even became mistresses. In these statutes, however, women's agency was very constrained as far as their family roles, and the incorporation process varied according to the socio-economic context. The following proposal thus fits into the debate on the social-capital approach to guild history and the "decline thesis" of women's roles in such guilds.

The study of the mercers' guild offers a representative sample of women's conditions - from street saleswomen to mistresses - and encompasses diverse professions such as perfumers and glassmakers. Attention will be paid to legal norms through study of these statutes, but also to testaments and judicial records in a society of Roman law. Analysis of the interplay between normative sources and those revealing actual practice helps shed light on women's agency in the world of craftsmanship as well as in the private sphere.

Women prove to have been essential to the Venetian economy; they negotiated their way through the hindrances of a patriarchal system. Widows made themselves indispensable to apprenticeship and the transmission of craft. They also took advantage of loopholes in the norms, as wives and daughters constituted an unavoidable and cheap workforce.