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

This splendid book is a model of history and technical writing. Its author, a highly respected historian and scholar of textile technologies, seeks to verify the long-surmised existence of a silk industry in medieval Paris. The extreme lack of documentation has kept historians from learning about silk making in medieval Paris before now. But samples of woven and embroidered silk in museums and notes in royal archives labeled "silk of Paris" kept alive the idea that a silk industry had existed. Farmer has used the Livre de métiers, tax rolls from the twelfth-fifteenth centuries, royal and aristocratic budget books, as well as examples of luxury silk products to reconstruct a vivid portrait of this industry. In addition, she has supplemented her archival research with a thorough study of the period.

Farmer's intent is not only to show that twelfth-fifteenth century Paris had a flourishing silk industry, but that it was fostered by immigrants from Italy and other countries, some of whom became thoroughly integrated into French society. In the course of doing so, she paints a broad picture of silk in Western Europe, the consumption patterns of wealthy individuals, and the unusual opportunities for women working in the Paris silk trade. To help readers who are not familiar with its technology, Farmer gives the clearest and most helpful description of the trajectory of silk from cocoon to woven cloth that I have seen. She leaves us with an understanding of the hierarchy of mercers selling the textile, to highly skilled weavers of soie de Paris and velvet, to female throwsters (spinners) preparing the thread for bobbins.

What is most extraordinary about her work is her ability to extrapolate economic relations and lived experience from the small clues in the sources. Though there are only traces, the author suggests that some mercers established their own workshops. From the tax rolls, she recreates neighborhoods of various kinds of silk workers, moneylenders, and mercers who sold the cloth. From guild statutes she concludes that spinners stole from the silk yarn they processed, and pawned it to pay for daily necessities.

Since these thread makers lived closest to the Jewish lenders, it was natural to use them. Besides, the Jewish lenders were mostly women who imposed easier terms than the Lombard lenders. From a few records of throwsters impregnated by Lombard lenders, Farmer deduces that women were more likely to borrow from the Jewish women because while Lombards (accused of half the rapes in Paris) left wives at home, the Jews lived in families.

Not only were Jewish women able to participate in the economy, Farmer estimates that there were 1,400 other women manufacturing silk. Of the 241 women listed on tax rolls with their profession, 26 percent were in silk. Even though most were spinners with incomes too low to appear on tax rolls, in general female silk workers' incomes were higher than those of other women working at textiles in northern France and the Lowlands.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by showing medieval Paris as a highly cosmopolitan center of royal residence and administrative officials who stimulated silk and other luxury trades. Chapter 2 details the manufacture of silk, and the important role of Lombard merchants in providing raw silk. The mostly female makers of prestigious "narrow goods" and the less-prestigious all-female guild weaving veils together constituted some forty-five weavers. Chapters 3 and 4 show that many mercers came from Italy, a few from Germany and the South of France. Their entrance to Paris is important because it helps to substantiate Farmer's claim that the technology was imported into Paris. As Chapter 5 indicates, silk industries through time have always been founded by skilled workers migrating. The mercers coming to France presumably brought such workers from northern Italy, enabling mercers to establish their own ateliers.

Aware that her method of...