Unfree Female Textile Workers in the Carolingian World

Although many women labored under compulsion in the Carolingian world (c.715-c.915), relatively little evidence concerning them survives. This dearth of sources makes it all the more remarkable that a range of Carolingian sources discuss servile women who toiled in textile workshops (gynaecea or piseles), sometimes in highly pejorative terms. These texts include capitularies (normative royal and episcopal statements), polyptychs (inventories of the dues and services owed to monasteries), wills, charters, and histories. Clerics and aristocratic laymen appear to have sometimes thought that the lack of male oversight at these workshops constituted a moral danger because they believed unfree female laborers were more sexually available than other women. Despite scholarship on the female slaves and dependents of monastic estates and on the economic role of low status textile production, no one has yet systematically assembled and analyzed Carolingian-era references to unfree women at work in gynaecea. Rather a range of scholars from Benjamin Guérard to David Herlihy have made generalizations about these women’s sexuality and lives based on a handful of cases. My own research has already shown that the situation was more complex, that elite men discussed servile female textile workers in a variety of ways. In my paper I will present an overview of the evidence for these unfree laborers with some telling examples and argue that this more complete body of the evidence provides a window into not only the lives of otherwise little-documented women but also the gendered rhetoric that shaped social expectations in the Carolingian world.