Projet ANR 2024-2027: DEFI: Droits, Economies, Femmes, Italie: Gender and Agency in Venice, Florence, Naples, Palermo, 16th-18th century.
Coordinatrice: Anna Bellavitis, Professeure d’histoire moderne, GRHIS, Université de Rouen Normandie.
Partenaire scientifique : Corine Maitte, Professeure d’histoire moderne, ACP, Université Gustave Eiffel.
Ingénieur d’études : François Delisle, IE en production et analyse des données, GRHIS, Université de Rouen Normandie
The research group brings together specialists in the history of gender, the history of law, the history of work, and the economic and social history of Italy in the early modern period. It is based on the close and complementary collaboration between several French laboratories and several departments of Italian universities.
Participant.e.s:
Francesco Ammannati, research assistant of early modern history (University of Florence); Ida Fazio, full professor of early modern history (University of Palermo); Simona Feci, associate professor of medieval and early modern law history (University of Palermo); Vittoria Fiorelli, full professor of early modern history (University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples); Luciano Pezzolo, full professor of early modern history (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).
Eleonora Canepari, associate professor of early modern history (Aix-Marseille Université); Andrea Caracausi, full professor of economic history (University of Padua); Jean-François Chauvard, full professor of early modern history (University of Paris 1); Monica Martinat, full professor of early modern history (University of Lyon 2); Solène Rivoal, associate professor of early modern history (Institut National Universitaire Albi).
Objectives
The DEFI project proposes to study the contribution of women to the economy of four Italian cities, Venice, Florence, Naples and Palermo, during the early modern period.
The choice of the urban environment is indeed linked to its specificities and its importance in Italian economy: a labour market which is both controlled and regulated by municipal institutions and guilds but at the same time a space which offers multiple possibilities, whether legal or illegal, clandestine or shadow work being a characteristic of women’s work in these times. These cities are representative of the political and socio-economic diversity of the Italian peninsula, which cannot be reduced to the opposition between a Centre-North characterised by an ancient urban and manufacturing tradition and a South characterised by a more agricultural economy. On the contrary, we assume that this research will be able to show the vitality of the urban economies of Southern Italy and the contribution that women gave to them.
The first objective is to reconstruct and quantify women’s activities, thanks to the intersection of quantitative and qualitative data in a historical period undergoing profound transformation and characterised by recurrent crises. Research on women’s work in pre-industrial societies has often been hampered by the silence of the archives, particularly with regard to the work of married women. This documentary situation has encouraged historians to multiply sources, by resorting to ‘qualitative’ sources and in particular judicial sources, particularly in England and Scandinavia where notarial sources are notoriously absent. The choice to widen the range of sources is also the choice of our project, as the collection of data on women in history is still necessary and far from complete.
The second objective is to focus on how women’s work makes it possible to cope with crises both in the family and in the urban economy: what consequences does the relative marginalisation of the Italian economy during the early modern age have on female employment? What activities are abandoned and what new possibilities arise? Our hypothesis is that, contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, women are not expelled from economic activities or relegated to unpaid domestic tasks, but on the contrary constitute essential elements in helping the economies of their families and cities to overcome crises.
The third objective is to rethink the history of the Italian economy in a global manner, overcoming the traditional dichotomy between the North and the South of the peninsula: urban contexts, despite their diversity, have common characteristics that make them comparable, especially since they are cities with important political roles. The challenge is so to conduct research that embraces and compares northern and southern Italy, whereas Italian historiography remains very largely situated within the framework of the old preunitary states.
The fourth objective – which is the question from which our project started – is that the data collected on women’s activities, agency and wages in these Italian towns will constitute new elements of criticism against the model of the ‘Little divergence’ between Northern and Southern Europe forged at the beginning of the millennium. In doing so, we wish to provide the material necessary to rethink the whole economic and social history of early modern Europe, one that gives due value to the role of women and highlights the complexity of gender relations at work.
In order to develop as much as possible a truly comparative approach, we have identified three types of sources that can be found in these four realities:
1)the legal sources: edited statutes of the four cities, in particular commercial, inheritance and labour laws. In fact, if the origins of law in the ancient Italian States are to be sought in the ius commune of Roman origin, the variations between State and State and also between city and city were significant and in the perspective of a research that crosses family roles and work roles it is indispensable that all the nuances of the different rights are brought to light. This will allow the project to provide a comparative perspective on women’s rights in these four cities, which has never been done before.
2) the archives of the charitable institutions in which women lived and worked, in order to reconstruct their activities and remunerations, but also follow their paths after leaving the institution. In fact, these institutions, which are particularly important in Italy and bring together large sections of the female labour force, have never been studied in terms of their economic importance. In all the cities considered by the project these institutions exist and develop during the early modern period.
3) the notarial archives, which will allow a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the economic activities of individuals, including women from the middling sort or even the elites (loans, bequests, contracts, management of businesses and assets, etc.). In this way, ‘games of scale’ will be possible between a ‘macro’ approach based on more ‘quantitative’ sources and a ‘micro’ approach, using ‘qualitative’ sources.
These three main types of sources will be supplemented in each centre by specific documentation (censuses and tax sources; guilds’ archives; private archives; enterprises’ archives) which will enable a deeper understanding of local realities.
