To browse Academia. This paper explores the involvement of women in business during the Late Middle Ages. Our research has focused on the activities undertaken by women living in the most important economic centres of the Crown of Aragon, taking into consideration the contributions made by female historians who have carried out their studies in other areas.
The research hypothesis is that mothers and wives took over businesses in critical periods with such efficiency that they became a threat to the interests of their merchant fathers and husbands. To demonstrate this, unpublished records preserved in the Historical Protocols Archive of Barcelona, the Historical Notarial Protocols Archive of Zaragoza, the Crown of Aragon Archive, and the Archivio di Stato di Prato have been studied together with other published references.
Data arising from these files demonstrate that, in the absence of men, women carried out efficiently the management functions of the companies. Wives, widows, and daughters of merchants, were independent women that actively participated in running the family businesses. Writers of the 15th and 16th Centuries The articles in this issue are based on talks given at "Querelles des femmes: French Women Writers of the 15th and 16th Centuries," an intimate colloquium held in the French section of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday, November 8, Our primary purpose in organizing this colloquium was to put scholars of medieval and Renaissance French in dialogue with one another, and to stress the common culture, concerns, and literary genres and techniques shared by writers from both periods.
To facilitate this conversation, our speakers focused primarily on two seminal women writers, Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre, who bear a number of striking similarities to one another: both are widely acknowledged as proto-feminists who use their writing to challenge the misogynistic tropes and discourse common in both their respective periods, both simultaneously draw heavily on and react strongly against the corpus of courtly love literature and its authoritative texts particularly Jean de Meun and Alain Chartier , and both reflect on what it means to write as a woman, and on how women writers must present themselves to their readers.
Part One, "Gendered Discourses: Polemics and Codes," examines how linguistic and discursive registers and modes both govern and are governed by gender roles. Katherine Kong's "Between meretrix and pute: The polemical uses of gender in the Querelle du Roman de la Rose" shows how Christine and her opponents use terms denoting prostitutes or courtesans with significantly different connotations in order to articulate their positions in the debate over how to read and understand the Rose, and, in the case of.
