Work and Identity in Early Modern Portugal: What Did Gender Have to Do With It?

This paper examines the extent to which work labels can be said to identify a person's primary occupation in early modern Europe. In particular, the essay attempts to explain the motives for including and excluding particular identifiers in a number of 16th- and 17th-century archival records found in Portugal. Of special interest is the preponderance of record keepers to use the term, the wife of, to denote early modern Portuguese women. The paper proposes that historians explore the multifaced meanings of this label, for it clearly represented a lot more than a symbol of marital status.