members in their occupation and continued in the trade as widows. Single women
(femmes soles) were also often involved in artisanal activities. Some twenty of the forty-
one cloth-industry employees of the exploitative Jehan Boinbroke of Douai were women.
Numerous wetnurses and midwives and occasional female surgeons have been recorded.
Women served as petty merchants but rarely in long-distance commerce, where if they
were involved at all it was as sedentary investors. Generally, women in business could
appear in court, independent of their husbands, in matters of their trade.
Women were denied access to guild membership in many trades; in others, widows
achieved guild membership in their husbands’ stead. Some guilds were exclusively
female. According to the Livre des métiers of Étienne Boileau (1292), drawn up for tax
purposes in Paris, six guilds were female only, but women were working in eighty others,
out of over 120 in all. In Toulouse, women were admitted to the guilds of weaver, cloth
finisher, candlemaker, wax merchant, and avoir-du-poids merchant. In Montpellier, there
was female guild membership only for the caritat des fourniers (bakers), whose
regulations were recorded in 1365. In Arras, widows who had not remarried could enjoy
membership in the same food trades as their late husbands. Guilds with predominantly
female membership usually had male governance.
Wages for women were lower than those for men in comparable employment, a fact
that led to the preferential hiring of some women and the disgruntlement of unemployed
men. Piecework was usually financially more advantageous for women. In late-medieval
France, commercial possibilities for women tended to narrow in the increasingly negative
economic climate.
Kathryn L.Reyerson
[See also: STAINED GLASS; TEXTILES]
Dixon, E. “Craftswomen in the Livre des métiers.” Economic Journal 5(1895):209–28.
Jordan, William C. “Jews on Top: Women and the Availability of Consumption Loans in Northern
France in the Mid-Thirteenth Century.” Journal of Jewish Studies 29(1978): 39–57.
Reyerson, Kathryn L. “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier.” In Women and Work in
Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, pp.
117–44.
WOMEN’S SONGS
. The women’s songs, or chansons de femme, accounting for a significant part of the Old
French lyric corpus, constitute not a genre but a conceptual set identified by female voice
and exclusive preoccupation with love. Though limited thematically, their poetic
elaboration, like their music, is highly diversified and ranges from products of a
precourtly, even pre-Christian, European tradition, as is reflected also in Portuguese or
Germanic songs, to compositions variously influenced by the forms and ideology of the
troubadour-derived grand chant style. From the most archaic, folkloric type to the most
aristocratized, it is likely that most pieces extant, transmitted largely by the same
chansonniers that preserve the courtly trouvère compositions of the 12th and 13th
centuries, were written or rewritten by men; almost all are anonymous. Though
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1866