The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience by Sharon Farmer (review)

The goal of this study is to establish that Paris really did have a silk cloth industry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that this industry played an important role in the local economy, particularly as a source of employment for women. The study also traces the long-distance immigration of skilled silk artisans from the Mediterranean basin to Northern France, and the attendant travel of luxury silk technology from ancient centers of silk production to Northern and Western Europe. As a result, it contributes to the growing body of academic discourse on issues of migration, cultural difference, and gender in the High and Late French Middle Ages, particularly as these issues dialogue with myths of national identity that continue to engage French society today.

The study is grounded in a variety of sources, including hard prosopographical data collected from Parisian guild statutes generated between 1266 and 1365, seven Parisian tax assessments generated between 1292 and 1313, and household accounts and inventories from the courts of England, France, Artois, Savoy, Flanders, Hainaut, Sweden, Navarre, and Rome. Farmer supplements this data with narrative evidence from fragmentary civil and criminal court records of late fourteenth-century Paris, and also with miracle stories from the late thirteenth century, which offer windows into daily lives of immigrants, Parisian Jews, apprentices, and working women. Farmer has demonstrated great skill in deciphering both types of sources: in Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (2002) she dexterously handled prosopographical data to uncover the lived realities of the urban poor; in Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (1991) she demonstrated her ease with contextualizing legendary hagiographical material. The originality of the present study resides in a measured reading of both types of sources, which blend to create a vivid picture of the major actors and centers in the medieval Parisian silk trade.

In Chapter 1, Farmer establishes the historical context of the thirteenth-century advent of skilled luxury silk production in Paris by examining French ties to the Mediterranean through dynastic marriages and through the attraction of foreign scholars to the University of Paris. Turning to the Parisian tax assessments of 1292–1313, she demonstrates that Paris was not only a center of administration, scholarship, and aristocratic consumption, but also a haven of artisanal production. A strategic reading of surnames and other indicators of geographic origin listed in these sources reveals at least 200 non-elite heads of household of foreign origin, including 130 Northern Italians, 30 Iberians, 10 Cypriots, 19 people from Acre, and a handful of people from Islamic lands. Farmer indicates the limitations of her sources: tax assessments list heads of household without indicating the number of members; nobles and ecclesiasts were exempt from taxation; about 60% of the population was too poor to pay taxes; fewer than half of all taxpayers bore surnames or other indicators of their geographical origins, and thus their status as immigrants could not be assessed. With these limitations in mind, Farmer proceeds with her demographic analysis of these artisans, assessing the tissue of connections that moved them from the Mediterranean to Northern France. She also paints their varying degrees of assimilation once they arrived there, arguing that many shed their identities as foreigners and began to live as French.

Chapter 2 proceeds with an examination of the production processes within the silk textile industry, tracing the evolution of silk from its origins as raw fiber in silkworm cocoons on the shores of the Caspian Sea, in China, in Greece, or in Southern Italy, through the intermediary processes of throwing, degumming, spinning, and dying, to the sale of the finished product in Paris. This chapter is instrumental in tracing trade networks linking Paris to the Mediterranean world, and to Central Asia and Asia. Similarly, Chapter 3 turns to guild statutes to trace immigrant networks, arguing that a subset of Parisian...