The Groom’s Dowry: Reconsidering Gender and Dowry in Medieval Catalonia, 1250–1350

Decades of scholarship have emphasized the gendered nature of the dowry system in the medieval Western Mediterranean. Dowry itself is defined as a gift that brides brought to their new husbands. The concept of a groom’s dowry therefore seems to be a contradiction in terms, but in the Catalan town of Vic between 1250 and 1350, some marrying couples adopted a minority practice wherein grooms brought dowries to their brides, who in turn promised their new husbands the countergift ordinarily given by grooms. This article analyzes a corpus of eighty gender-reversed dowry contracts within the larger context of marriage contracts from Vic and beyond. These contracts highlight the potential flexibility of marriage practices: families with heiress daughters, and men seeking to marry higher-status women, found gender-reversed dowry contracts particularly useful in structuring the economic arrangements behind their marriages. They also reveal that the standard dowry system reflected, not created, gendered norms surrounding property management. Even in gender-reversed dowry marriages, wives did not play a more prominent role as managers of household wealth than their counterparts who married under the traditional dowry system. Rather, gender-reversed dowries suited families concerned with the symbolic implications of property exchanges; the receipt of a groom’s dowry brought the new husband into the family, whereas the transmission of a bride’s dowry transferred the daughter into another family. They also benefited men from the rural hinterlands who sought to integrate into Vic’s urban social and economic networks.