Contracts and Conflicts: Women's Socio-Economic and Legal Activities in Late Fifteenth-Century Carpentras

This paper explores the legal cases and contracts that women pursued in late fifteenth-century Carpentras, a papal enclave in southern France, and explains how and when women acted as primary agents in them. Contracts and lawsuits were crucial in maintaining and protecting an individual and family's socio-economic welfare, capitalist enterprises, and social networks.

Using cases heard before the bishop's court and contracts formalized by notaries, the paper discusses the lawsuits women initiated, the property women held, and the contracts they formed. The findings suggest that women were active members in the local economy and acknowledged as legitimate legal actors. Women exchanged loans and collected debts, engaged in labor contracts, managed investment property, and established marriage contracts. Wives, widows, and abbesses participated in their own names and with female and male relatives.  To what degree women practiced economic autonomy, though, is hard to coax from the records.

Methods include those drawn from legal studies, social history, and prosopography. The paper analyzes ten years of data organized into a database tracking women and their socio-economic activities according to the following categories: name, title, marital status, profession, property owned, and type of legal or economic activity. As studies of its neighbors Avignon, Provence, and Italy demonstrate, such quantitative work helps us identify and understand women's economic roles, strategies, and social networks. As a broader goal, the paper opens a conversation about the similarities between the diverse, oft-ignored roles played in local economies by medieval women to their counterparts in modern male-dominated systems.