Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd ed. by Kim Kippen and Lori Woods (review)

This collection of essays in honour of Barbara Todd displays just how much the field of women’s history she pioneered has flourished, while also serving as a bellwether of the research in medieval and early modern women’s history to come. The sixteen essays in this substantial collection, arranged under the categories of labour, law, and recreation, not only expand our understanding of gender in late medieval and early modern Europe, but also invite a reconsideration of our standard depiction of women’s history more generally. Even though the first section’s title is ‘Working the Margins,’ the research presented on women’s labour and legal statuses in civic life suggests that perhaps the binary of centre and margin is not the most apt metaphor for premodern and early modern women’s experiences. Hilda Smith’s observation, that ‘women traversed the interstices of London’s economic, legal and political realities,’ offers a more felicitous image for the volume’s portrayal of women’s history. These scholars reveal historical women as frequently more interstitial in rather than outside of the professional and civic worlds of their times. Articles on women beggars in the London cityscape, late medieval Catalan women healers endowed with partial physician’s privileges, and the remarkable profession of ‘Parish Searcher’ open to elderly women in eighteenth-century London, for instance, highlight occasions when women’s absences in history books are, ironically, due to their ubiquity or lack of exceptionality.

Nonetheless, even as several essays investigating the intersection of gender and economic history qualify long-held commonplaces about women’s exclusion from skilled occupations or lack of legal personhood, others respond to Judith Bennett’s call in History Matters to scrutinize the longevity of patriarchy. In the section ‘Using the Law,’ essays on late medieval Genovese legal clauses granting women more independence or the apparent judicial activism on behalf of feme sole traders by Lord Mansfield in eighteenth-century England expose the pragmatic flexibility of patriarchy, allowing for the circumvention of certain norms in order to preserve the broader familial and economic systems that perpetuate patriarchal interests. The efforts expended in these essays to parse the ‘tangibles’ of the archive afford readers the pleasure of encountering several riveting historical narratives, as well as providing some judiciously compiled accounts of particular communities, such as silk workers in charitable enclosures or English Catholic girls’ schools on the Continent. Yet readers are also reminded of the hazards of the archive, lest we forget that the law and its documents could be manipulated. Both Shannon McSheffrey’s account of the legal machinations around the late medieval marriage of a London fishmonger’s daughter and the keeper of the king’s Wardrobe and Tim Stretton’s delineation of the links between the private and public lives of the infamous Elizabethan George Puttenham offer cautionary tales that the archive can as easily record elaborately produced fictions as facts.

The need to question, borrowing McSheffrey’s phrase, ‘the epistemic bases of historical knowledge’ is reinforced by the collection’s concluding section on ‘Performing, Playing and Pleasing,’ where the role of performance as a technology of self-fashioning appears in a variety of contexts, from the military exercise to the travel narrative, the courtroom to the dance manual. That the final section focuses primarily on men’s negotiations of gender and class expectations illustrates the role pioneers in women’s history such as Barbara Todd have played in advancing the history of gender itself as a category of analysis, allowing scholars to discern, as Natalie Zemon Davies states in her introduction, ‘how gender issues contribute to or figure in specific historical change.’ For this reason, Emily Winerock’s excellent essay on early modern dance is a fitting conclusion to this collection. Exploring a unique social context in which, she reminds...