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“Half as Much as a Man”?: Gender Ideology and Practice in Medieval Flanders
- Journal of Women's History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2011
- pp. 132-154
- 10.1353/jowh.2011.0005
- Article
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In his account of 18 September 1379, the bailiff of the Vier Ambachten, a rural circumscription in Flanders, noted that a woman was to be fined “only half as much as a man.” This assertion “of half value,” however, was the first of its kind. An examination of early fourteenth-century Flemish accounts indicates that the “half-value” principle never found expression in practice. Over the course of the fourteenth century, changes took place in both social and economic practices that correlated with a growing constriction of female economic and social agency. The present argument is in line with other scholarship that makes claims for such a constriction within the late-medieval and early-modern period.