This book seeks to contribute a multi-dimensional, multi-layered and gendered approach to the illicit economy in the historiography of early modern Europe. Using original source material from several countries, this volume concentrates on a border and transnational area—approximately the Lyon-Geneva-Turin triangle—located at the heart of European trade. It focuses on three products—salt, cotton and silk—all of which fuelled the black market between the last decades of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution. This volume offers an original contribution to wider studies of smuggling, illicit markets and women’s economic roles by taking into account the economic life of remote mountain communities and industrious cities. Showing that irregular practices were a structural characteristic of early modern economies, it provides insight into the opportunities offered to women in a highly flexible economy where licit and illicit activities were intermingled in a very complex way. This research monograph is aimed at a historical audience and constitutes a useful resource for students and scholars interested in gender history, social and economic history, urban history and French studies.

Towns are imagined, lived and experienced, as much as they are conceived and constructed. They reflect cultural and intellectual currents, prevailing economic climates and unresolved tensions. They are physical entities, shaped by topography, time and technology, as well as social and spatial constructs. They are also always gendered and contested spaces. This volume, the last from the Gender in the European Town (GENETON) project, approaches life in the European town over time and across class and national boundaries. Through contextualized case studies, it provides scholars and students with new research—snapshots—of contemporary physical and built environments that explores how contemporary urban residents experienced and deployed gendered urban spaces over an important period of modernization.

This book charts the lives of (suspected) thieves, illegitimate mothers and vagrants in early modern Frankfurt. The book highlights the gender differences in recorded criminality and the way that they were shaped by the local context. Women played a prominent role in recorded crime in this period, and could even make up half of all defendants in specific European cities. At the same time, there were also large regional differences. Women’s crime patterns in Frankfurt were both similar and different to those of other cities. Informal control within the household played a significant role and influenced the prosecution patterns of authorities. This impacted men and women differently, and created clear distinctions within the system between settled locals and unsettled migrants.

This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.

Towns are imagined, lived and experienced, as much as they are conceived and constructed. They reflect cultural and intellectual currents, prevailing economic climates and unresolved tensions. They are physical entities, shaped by topography, time and technology, as well as social and spatial constructs. They are also always gendered and contested spaces. This volume, the last from the Gender in the European Town (GENETON) project, approaches life in the European town over time and across class and national boundaries. Through contextualized case studies, it provides scholars and students with new research--snapshots--of contemporary physical and built environments that explores how contemporary urban residents experienced and deployed gendered urban spaces over an important period of modernization.

Imported from India, China, the Levant, and Persia and appreciated for their diversity, designs, fast bright colours and fine weave, Asian textiles became so popular in France that in 1686 the state banned their import, consumption and imitation. A fateful decision. This book tells the story of smuggling on a vast scale, savvy retailers and rebellious consumers. It also reveals how reformers in the French administration itself sponsored a global effort to acquire the technological know-how necessary to produce such textiles and how the vitriolic debates surrounding the eventual abolition of the ban were one of the decisive moments in the development of Enlightenment economic liberalism.

Do women have a history? Did women have a renaissance? These were provocative questions when they were raised in the heyday of women’s studies in the 1970s. But how relevant does gender remain to premodern history in the twenty-first century? This book considers this question in eight new case studies that span the European continent from 1400 to 1800. An introductory essay examines the category of gender in historiography and specifically within premodern historiography, as well as the issue of source material for historians of the period. The eight individual essays seek to examine gender in relation to emerging fields and theoretical considerations, as well as how premodern history contributes to traditional concepts and theories within women’s and gender studies, such as patriarchy.

The first full-length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. Specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house.

This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.