‘On herself and all her property’: women's economic activities in late-medieval Ghent

Abstract

This article analyses the economic activities of urban Flemish women in actual practice, using contracts and court judgements from the mid-fourteenth-century registers of the aldermen of Ghent. These ‘acts’ show that women routinely invested and managed their own property without male representatives and that distinctions of marital status were often far less significant in medieval Ghent than elsewhere in northern Europe. Another conceptualization of the scope of women's economic activity also existed at the time, in which men acted for women, but it was not the dominant norm in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent.