Gender and economy in medieval Milan: the autonomy of lay and religious women in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

In the last hundred years, scholarship has become increasingly aware of the importance of women in medieval history and has covered their lives from a variety of angles. Overall, it has emerged that women often lived in subordination to men and had limited economic and legal agency. However, studies from various parts of Western Europe have identified a large variation in the experience of women across different regions and different points in the medieval period. Depending on the legal system of an area, its economic welfare, and its cultural and religious situation, women could have important economic rights, a central place in family politics, and significant religious freedoms, or they could find themselves completely controlled by men, sidelined in their families, and forced to cloister against their will. Despite the evidence for variation over time and space, many regions and time periods have not received enough attention. In the Italian peninsula, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Milan is the most notable gap. By the end of the thirteenth century, this city had become an economic powerhouse, a central point in international politics, and had experienced significant legal and governmental changes. However, the role of women in the city or how this changed in this turbulent period has not been discussed. This creates a blind spot in our understanding of medieval women, as we largely ignore how they lived in a fundamental city in Southern Europe. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the economic agency lay and religious women had. To do so, this study relies on almost 6,000 parchments from the Archivio di Stato di Milano, which detail the economic transactions and disputes of most Milanese religious institutions of the period. Through this large amount of economic data, this study quantifies how frequently lay women participated in the economy and with what legal and cultural limitations. It focuses on the way abbesses managed the economy of their nunneries compared to the management styles of abbots and other male leaders. It continues with a quantification of the wealth and size of nunneries and male religious institutions, finally finishing with a discussion on the participation of nuns in the economy. This research shows that Milanese women, whether lay or religious, could participate less freely in the economy than men and generally had less wealth. However, abbesses had a great deal of control over the economies of their monasteries, which allowed them to play a large role in the Milanese economy. Among laywomen, widows could act with the greatest independence, but some exceptional examples exist of wives or unmarried women also acting with great freedom. This research therefore confirms that women had limited independence, especially when participating in the economy, but significant exceptions could exist. Furthermore, this research demonstrates the benefit of quantitatively analysing the surviving parchments of ecclesiastical institution to better understand the religious and lay life of a city in the twelfth and thirteenth century.