Stories Worth Telling: Women as Business Owners and Investors in Early Modern Milan

In March 1605, the widow Antonia from the parish of San Gottardo near Milan’s commercial center filed an apprehensio, a legal claim or lien on property, against her deceased husband’s business as compensation for the L.6,010 dowry she brought when she married Francesco Palazzoli in January 1597.¹ Antonia’s demands included her husband’s shop, the tools of his trade, and the house attached to the business in which the couple had lived.² Although the eventual outcome of Antonia’s suit remains a mystery, evidence from similar cases suggests that she not only prevailed in her demands, but also planned to continue the operation of her husband’s business, albeit with a male employee in charge of daily operations. Part of what makes Antonia’s story so compelling is the historic moment in which it took place, with Milan poised for economic changes. Evidence culled from the vast repository of notarial documents dated between the plagues of 1576 and 1630 indicate that non-patrician women of limited, but not insignificant, wealth played a pivotal role in Milan’s ability to survive the commercial and industrial upheavals the city suffered during the early decades of the 1600s.

Women in Milan and other early modern Italian cities fell into three very general groups with distinct social roles, although women of all three strata, save for the most destitute, supported early modern Milan’s economy as consumers.³ At the top of the social order, with lives centered on their families and homes, were the tiny minority belonging to the patriciate. At the bottom, a much larger group eked out an existence as unskilled labor in the putting-out system, as domestic servants, or as prostitutes. At the center were the middling women, primarily widows like Antonia, who are the focus here. In command of moderate wealth from dowries and inheritances, endowed with limited legal standing, and experienced as helpers in their husbands’ businesses, the wives and widows of Milan’s merchants and artisans possessed property, entered investment partnerships, and owned businesses. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, which brought myriad challenges to the Milanese economy, women like Antonia appeared in increasing numbers of business contracts. The hundreds of documents penned by Milanese notaries and preserved in the Archivio di Stato reveal that ordinary women of one of early modern Europe’s most prominent cities had a place in its economic fabric and left behind a story worth telling.

Blessed by geography, Milan sits in a fertile plain served by the Po River and at the intersection of several trade routes. As early as 222 BCE, Milan enjoyed prominence as a center for trade and commerce, becoming the capital of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the third century BCE. By the tenth century, a number of medieval cities including Milan enjoyed prosperous public markets.⁴ In the twelfth century, Milan was part of an emerging urban commercial capitalism,⁵ and would remain one of Europe’s largest and most prosperous cities for the next several hundred years.⁶

Politics also had a hand in the city’s success, with policies that supported the city’s industrial, agricultural, commercial, and financial development, particularly its silk industry, prized in luxury markets throughout Europe by the mid-fifteenth century. By 1610, however, the city experienced changes,⁷ as recurring bouts of famine and war, as well as competition from less expensive goods from other parts of Europe⁸ challenged its prosperity.

A vast historiography surrounds the nature and implications of the economic changes that overtook Italy in the seventeenth century, from those who argue for a complete collapse to those who — as I do here — suggest a more nuanced picture⁹ of economies evolving and changing along a continuum.¹⁰ One of the earliest discussions of women as a force for economic continuity in turbulent times was the 1980 article, “Women and Industry in Florence,” by Judith C. Goodman and Jordan Brown. The authors asserted that the increased employment of women as unskilled...