Women's Networks in Medieval France: Gender and Community in Montpellier, 1300-1350

✍ Scribed by Kathryn L. Reyerson (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 280
• Series: The New Middle Ages
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book illuminates the connections and interaction among women and between women and men during the medieval period. To do this, Kathryn L. Reyerson focuses specifically on the experiences of Agnes de Bossones, widow of a changer of the mercantile elite of Montpellier. Agnes was a real estate mogul and a patron of philanthropic institutions that permitted lower strata women to survive and thrive in a mature urban economy of the period before 1350. Notably, Montpellier was a large urban center in southern France. Linkages stretched horizontally and vertically in this robust urban environment, mitigating the restrictions of patriarchy and the constraints of gender. Using the story of Agnes de Bossones as a vehicle to larger discussions about gender, this book highlights the undeniable impact that networks had on women’s mobility and navigation within a restrictive medieval society.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xxix
Agnes de Bossones’s Origins, Marriage, and Litigation....Pages 1-18
Agnes’s Family Networks....Pages 19-27
Agnes’s Networks of Property....Pages 29-40
Marriage....Pages 41-66
Apprenticeship....Pages 67-90
Urban–Rural Connections....Pages 91-109
Women of the Marketplace: Horizontal and Vertical Links....Pages 111-127
A Community of Prostitutes in Campus Polverel....Pages 129-145
Agnes’s Networks of Philanthropy....Pages 147-174
Back Matter....Pages 175-257

✦ Subjects

History of Medieval Europe;Medieval Literature;History of France