Space, Order, and Resistance: Recent Writings on Women and Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

One of the more recent developments in the realms of social and cultural history has been a growing interest in the question of physical space, and how human beings living in various times and places have occupied space, parsed it, and sought to control it. Such inquiries lent more substance and dynamism to our mental image of past people than is conveyed by the study of words alone. Further, space is an issue that is always in play, regardless of the situation, person, or idea one seeks to study: all past events, after all, played themselves out in some space or other. Given the omnipresence of space and its use as an issue, it is unsurprising that studies of the topic seem commonly to intersect with another omnipresent construct in human culture: gender. This review will discuss three recent studies that take up both the question of space and of women's place within it.

Marjorie Keniston McIntosh's Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 is an excellent example of the way in which space is an omnipresent issue. Although her book does not overtly propose to take up space and its use as a main theme, her exhaustively detailed description of the work of women within the later medieval and early modern English economy would be immeasurably poorer without her nuanced analysis of the space in which that work was carried out. In this book, McIntosh has provided a foundational descriptive work that builds on earlier, more localized studies of women's work in later medieval England. She paints a picture of the full spectrum of women's economic activities, and one that explores these activities over a longer span of time than most previous studies, by exploring the richly detailed evidence provided by petitions to have a case heard in equity courts (Chancery, Requests, and Exchequer). These petitions, which explained the situation that inspired the attempted suit, provide a level of detail not usually available in other court proceedings. Further, unlike other courts in later medieval and early modern England, the equity courts did not require that women be represented by (and hence hidden by) their husbands (20–21). McIntosh describes a variety of economic communities by amassing samples of such petitions from five market towns across England, only one of which was located near England's largest and most oft-studied economic center, London.

Keniston's exhaustive exploration of the types of work in which women engaged and, more briefly, the types of spending they did, ties together and refines much previous work. She argues that the post-plague period was a moment of economic opportunity for some women, but that these opportunities diminished over time, so that by 1620 most women's work was unskilled and poorly paid. Along the way, she describes a variety of social and cultural phenomena that were integral to women's work, such as: credit, in the sense of economic borrowing and also in the sense of social reputation; guild organization and the law, and their effects on women's work; and the physical and mental construction of space, which labeled certain types of space "appropriate" or "inappropriate" for women's economic activities. Women's work as domestic servants, for example, was overlaid with anxiety about the supervision of women; while women who resided with (and were thus continuously supervised by) the family they served were...