| Popis: |
This chapter offers fresh insights into women’s lived experiences of labour – whether courtly, bourgeois, lower status, or monastic – as well as into how cultural activities could be constructed as work in historical periods. The broad chronological span of the chapter challenges the artificial periodisation which posits a break from the medieval to the early modern around 1500, and which continues to inform much contemporary scholarship on premodern women, their experiences of work, and indeed, medieval and modern history itself. By tracing shifts in the meanings attributed to the concepts of work and labour in the premodern European past, the chapter demonstrates the historical value of an expanded understanding of work. The chapter also identifies how particular concepts of work have influenced the historiography of women’s work in recent decades, exploring how seminal studies framed key questions, and the theoretical considerations underpinning their source analysis. Building on our aim to extend the concepts and language used to analyse historical women’s working experiences, this chapter acknowledges that women’s working lives were intricately intertwined with a range of legal, guild, civic, and cultural discourses and practices. |
