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  • Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Barbara Todd
  • Susan McDonough
Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Barbara Todd. Edited by Kim Kippen and Lori Woods (Toronto, Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011) 491 pp. $37.00

This rich festschrift in honor of Barbara Todd showcases the influence of her important work on widows, women’s legal agency within the English common law system, and women’s economic power. Together, the chapters provide a model of interdisciplinarity, with studies that draw on legal and medical history, performance studies, economic history, and religious history. A common attention to women’s or gender history allows the various authors to revisit familiar sources with new eyes. The volume is weighted toward English topics, following Todd’s own research, though Continental Europe is represented in articles that focus on Italian city-states, Valencia, and early modern travels in France.

Worth and Repute is divided into three sections of loosely linked [End Page 88] chapters. The first, “Working the Margins,” includes a fine study from Nicholas Terpstra. Examining the overlap between the development of the early modern Italian silk industry and the enclosure of poor women in workhouses, Terpstra argues that the silk merchants’ charitable endowments of these institutions guaranteed labor for difficult and ill-paid work. He calls for a revaluation of the notion that early modern workhouses had only an indifferent impact on European industrialization.

Two chapters illuminate medieval and early modern women’s participation in a spectrum of medical practices. Woods’ chapter uses records of pastoral visits to trace the career of one female practitioner in medieval Iberia. She argues that attention to “‘the middle ground’ of medical practice,” which she situates between the unlicensed healers on the one hand and university-trained physicians on the other, challenges the idea that women were not accepted as diagnosticians in medieval society (93). In a world where university-trained physicians were few, women who were partially licensed served an important role in diagnosing and treating the sick. Kevin Siena deploys coroners’ inquests, fiction, and medical narratives to argue that female searchers of the dead had more authority to offer definitive opinions on causes of death than scholars have previously understood.

“Using the Law,” from which the twin notions of the law’s malleability and adaptability emerge, is the most coherent of the collection’s three sections. Sharon McShefferey’s study of a seemingly commonplace announcement of a marriage and her careful reconstruction of its suspicious circumstances serves as an important reminder that historians of the law ought to be circumspect not only about what medieval documents can tell us but also about why medieval people wrote things down in the first place. Dana Wessell Lightfoot argues that elite Valencian widows remarried for complex reasons; they were not just pawns in the games that their families played. Jamie Smith’s study of Genoese wives with absent husbands settles the case of which family (natal or marital) was more important to women; they were equally important to her and vice versa. Her careful analysis of the modifications in Genoa’s laws shows how women continued their legal activities despite a husband’s absence. Hilda Smith and Karen Pearlston discuss early modern English women’s legal agency. Examining women’s petitions to the Court of Alderman and their presence in the freedom lists, Smith discovers that women exercised a significant independence as artisans and shop owners. Investigating feme sole traders’ ability to incur debt and sign contracts, Pearlston highlights the limits that even judges favorable to women’s independent economic activities placed on early modern women.

The chapters in the last section, “Performing, Playing, and Pleasing,” have the least obvious connection with each other, but they have an important role in the volume by introducing differing masculinities and sexualities. Tim Stretton’s chapter combines legal and literary sources to consider the unsavory actions of George Puttenham, a courtier [End Page 89] and literary man. He presents the multiple “scripts, codes or ideals” from which Elizabethan men and women could draw their presentation of masculine behavior...

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