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Abstract
By the mid-thirteenth century, ordinary people in Catalonia and elsewhere in the Western Mediterranean turned to notaries to record both quotidian economic transactions and transformative moments in their lives, such as marriage and death. Notaries provided legal expertise in contractual forms on the basis of Roman law, but more importantly, they transformed private social and economic relationships into public facts. As a result, they played a fundamental role in both economic and family life. Historians have described this phenomenon as the rise of notarial culture.
This dissertation employs notarial contracts to reveal the different economic options available to Jewish and Christian women in medieval Catalan cities. I consider the examples of three Catalan cities, of varying size and economic profile: Barcelona, Girona, and Vic. I argue that although both Jewish and Christian families relied on women's labor to ensure the economic stability of the household, Christian women enjoyed a broader range of economic rights, and consequently engaged in a wider array of transactions, contributing their labor as managers of financial resources. Christian marriage and inheritance practices endowed women with at least theoretical claims over both conjugal and family estates. These claims often required women to contribute their labor as managers of financial resources in public, notarized transactions.
Jewish practices, in contrast, limited women's rights over both the family patrimony and conjugal property. As a result, they less routinely engaged in the public labor of managing assets. Jewish women also remained less integrated into notarial culture. The notariate remained a fundamentally male and Christian space, leaving Jewish women twice removed from the notarial economy. However, moments of crisis or necessity sometimes required Jewish families and communities to seek additional labor contributions from women, particularly in the sphere of credit. Due to their marginal status, the Jewish community proved particularly susceptible to these moments of crisis. I draw on thousands of contracts in Latin notarial registers, including loans, property sales and rentals, commercial investments, and apprenticeship contracts, as evidence of women's formal and public participation in economic transactions. Catalan law codes and Hebrew responsa (legal rulings solicited from rabbinic authorities), as well as notarial marriage contracts, wills, and other inheritance documents, provide evidence for the legal basis of women's economic rights.
Marriage and kinship formed the twin bases for women's access to financial resources. Christian legal practice affirmed wives' claims over their husbands' estates, while Jewish practice weakened these claims. Moreover, Christian marriage practices integrated young women into notarial culture, as they began their married life with a series of notarial contracts. Jewish couples rarely registered marriage contracts with Christian notaries, and thus lacked this early experience of engagement with notarial culture. Differences between Jewish and Christian inheritance practices also limited Jewish women's control over financial assets. While Catalan Christians often divided estates equally between all sons and daughters, Catalan Jews typically disinherited married daughters.
Notarial contracts reveal how women's access to financial resources manifested in their labor in the public sphere. I employ an expanded definition of women's work, which incorporates extending and obtaining credit, managing real estate holdings, and investing in commerce alongside more traditional forms of women's labor, such as artisanal production and domestic service. Jewish women played a more circumscribed role in public economic life. In moments of familial or communal need, they worked as creditors; some women even established successful moneylending careers. Yet they remained less likely than Christian women to extend or receive either consumer or commercial credit, except in a few moments of communal crisis. Jewish women also faced more obstacles in obtaining credit, investing in commerce, and buying and selling property.
Women's labor blurred the lines between public and private. Christian women creditors and debtors participated in the public circulation of wealth in order to build social capital in credit networks often rooted in kinship ties. Artisanal labor performed by women often represented an extension of their domestic responsibilities, as women worked in artisanal production alongside their husbands or in related trades. Women domestic servants left their own homes to perform private, domestic labor in unfamiliar spaces.
Due to a combination of Jewish legal practice and selective acculturation, Jewish and Christian women resembled one another more closely in their activities in the real estate market. Christians, and Jews transacting with Christians, emphasized women's theoretical claims over real property holdings. Given the differences between Jewish and Christian legal practice, the limits of acculturation particularly disadvantaged Jewish women.
