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ABSTRACT
Though previous scholarship has presumed singlewomen in medieval Southern Europe were nearly non-existent and had few means, notarial sources from the late medieval Mediterranean reveal not only that singlewomen were present in the thriving port cities, but also that they created extensive networks among other women and men in order to survive and in some cases to flourish. Some had children out of wedlock, some were formerly enslaved, others traveled long distances and still remembered family members in their places of origin, and many built new communities in their homes. Indeed, it is remarkable that many of these migrant and formerly enslaved women created deep ties to both local and migrant neighbors, and their actions suggest a sense of responsibility to manumit other enslaved peoples and give charity to poor women. We investigate how singlewomen strategically used their final wills and testaments and other notarial documents to sustain, post-mortem, the networks that nurtured the women in their life, both friends and family members. We consider how women bestowed personal goods and financial legacies to maintain and memorialize their relationships and to sustain community, even in their absence.
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Notes
1 Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca (ARM), notario Bernat Contestí, no. 2523, 45v (1458).
2 These were not always distinct categories, as we argue in McDonough and Armstrong-Partida, “Amigas and Amichs,” 50, 52–53.
3 Armstrong-Partida and McDonough, “Singlewomen in the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” 12–15.
4 Narbona Vizcaino, Pueblo, Poder y Sexo, 122–48; Bresc, “La prostitution médiévale en Méditerranée occidentale,” 255–72.
5 See McDonough, “Moving Beyond Sex,” 401–19.
6 Boffa, “Creating Identity Through the Act of Will-Making,” 212.
7 We have borrowed and expanded the definition of singlewomen from Beattie, Medieval Single Women, 8–9, and “‘Living as a Single Person’,” 327–40.
8 For a more extensive discussion of how women identified themselves in notarial documents, see Armstrong-Partida and McDonough, “Singlewomen in the Late Medieval Mediterranean.” This same pattern when identifying singlewomen in notarial records was noted by Reyerson, Women's Networks in Medieval France, 136, and “Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier,” 119; Rollo-Koster, “The Women of Papal Avignon,” 42, at 49. See also Klapisch-Zuber, “Female Celibacy and Service in Florence,” 172–73.
9 This problem was identified by Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” 131, 137.
10 Mummey and Reyerson, “Whose City Is This?,” 910–22; Rollo-Koster, “The Women of Papal Avignon,” 44–49. For migration in the Mediterranean, see Balard and Ducellier, Migrations et Diasporas Méditerranéennes; Vaquer, “Immigrants a Mallorca,” 353–62.
11 López Beltrán, “El trabajo de las mujeres,” 39–57; Comas, Muntaner, and Vinyoles, “Elles no només filaven,” 19–45.
12 Ortega Villoslada, “El trabajo femenino en Mallorca,” 461–69.
13 Much of the scholarship that employs a Mediterranean framework covers a broad chronology and is built on the commonalities and influences that unite the region. See, for example, Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; Abulafia, The Mediterranean in History; Catlos, “Why the Mediterranean?,” 1–18; Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, and “The Mediterranean and the ‘New Thalassology’,” 722–40; Husain and Fleming, A Faithful Sea; Hamilton and Silleras-Fernández, In and of the Mediterranean.
14 On Isabel de Sousa, a singlewoman from the upper ranks of Iberian society at the turn of the sixteenth century, see in this special issue Rodrigues, “Splendour in Life.”
15 Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection, 7. Considering a similar chronology for her study of the consumption of household goods in England, French, Household Goods and Good Households, 2, has likewise used the wills and inventories of households from 1300 to 1540 because she views this period as “a time of economic contraction sandwiched between the growth and maturation of the medieval economic system in the twelfth century and the rapid expansion of the sixteenth century.”
16 For scholarship that treats the Mediterranean as a unit of historical analysis, see above note 13.
17 For Mallorca, see Bosch, ‘“Servam et captivam meam’,” 177–204; Jover i Avellà, Mas i Forners, and Soto i Company, “Colonització feudal i esclavitud,” 19–48. For Crete, see McKee, “Inherited Status and Slavery,” 31–52. For Sicily, Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Meet; Abulafia, The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms.
18 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, 57–78.
19 Christian widows across the economic spectrum had access to more financial power and legal agency, often as guardians of their children, than married or single women, but as Pareta's example shows, widows with no family created their own networks through their last wills and testaments. See Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, 40–44, 65–67.
20 ARM, notario Bernat Contestí, no. 2515, 188v–189r (1460).
21 ARM, notario Bernat Contestí, no. 2507, 44r (1450). For more on caregiving between women, see Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris, 160.
22 ARM, notario Bernat Contestí, no. 2507, 44v (1450).
23 ARM, notario Bernat Contestí, no. 2507, 44v–45r (1450). “ … illud cofret depictum quod est in comestorio hospicii mihi unacum omnibus jocalibus sivie joyes que intus sunt.”
24 Smail, Legal Plunder, 36. See also Barceló Crespí, Davant la mort, 96–101. French, Household Goods, 44, 69, uses “charisma” synonymously with “opulence” or “visual impact” in her description of household goods like tapestries and bedding. For a helpful discussion of the shifting meanings of charisma, from the early Christian usage to the contemporary political, see Aurell, “The Notion of Charisma,” 607–37.
25 Meneghin, “The Second-Hand Clothing Business,” 529.
26 French, Household Goods, has recently shown the extent to which merchants and artisans after the plague used their new-found wealth to spend more on clothing, household furnishings, and larger homes.
27 Smail, Legal Plunder, 42.
28 Boffa, “Creating Identity Through the Act of Will-Making,” 220, briefly touches upon the “echoes of friendship” found in women's wills. Reyerson, “Wills of Spouses in Montpellier before 1350,” 50, has also noted the terms of endearment that appear in women's wills.
29 Goskar, “Material Worlds,” 191.
30 Arxiu Capitular de Mallorca (ACM), notario Mateu Salset, no. 14724, 89r–v (1382). Na Guarsasa and Na Corteya are the only women who are not identified as a daughter, wife, or widow of a man.
31 Archivio Storico di Commune di Palermo, Corte Pretoriana, reg. 1, 8r–9r (1330).
32 Le imbreviature del notaio Adamo de Citella a Palermo, doc. 86 (1298), 67–68.
33 ACM, notario Pere de Olives, no. 14726, 8v–9r (1372).
34 Comas-Via, “Looking for a Way to Survive,” 177–94, at 186.
35 Armstrong-Partida and McDonough, “Singlewomen in the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” 11–12.
36 Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice, 14–15, 17.
37 Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice, 18–19.
38 Mummey, “Measuring the Margins,” 118.
39 Le imbreviature del notaio Adamo de Citella a Palermo, doc. 184 and 184a (1299), 144. It seems likely that Constanza, who may have been from Calabria, and Puccio Shisha, a foreigner, were a concubinary couple.
40 ACM notario Mateu Salset, no. 14724, fol. 74v–75v (1380).
41 For an in-depth discussion of the parish churches and religious institutions supported by the laity in Palma de Mallorca, see Barceló, Davant la mort, 113–73.
42 ACM, notario Mateu Salset, no. 14724, fol. 75r (1380).
43 ACM, notario Mateu Salset, no. 14724, fol. 75v (1380).
44 ACM, notario Mateu Salset, no 14724, fol. 151r (1386).
45 This was a parish with noticeably poor parishioners. See Vose, “Friars on the Edge,” 212.
46 ACM, notario Mateu Salset, no. 14724, 58r–59v (1375). For friendship between medieval English widows, see French, “Loving Friends: Surviving Widowhood”, and for friendship between women in the context of thirteenth-century Iberia, see Liuzzo Scorpo, Friendship in Medieval Iberia, 184–86.
47 Archives Départementales des Pyrénées-Orientales, 31/113, notaire Andreu Romei, 10r–11r (1390).
48 McKee, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, 1312–1420, doc. 22, I:29–30. Pliti also bestowed four hyperpera on the singlewoman Puladhena, who may have been a domestic servant. She also owned the enslaved woman Euodhoquia.
49 Stahl, The Documents of Angelo de Cartura and Donato Fontanella: doc. 9, 3–4.
50 ACM, notario Gerau Coloma, no. 14700, 41v–42r (1388).
51 ACM, notario Mateu Salset, no. 14724, 107v–108r (1383) and 172r–174r (1388).
52 It was not uncommon for women to pool their resources to purchase an enslaved person. And it was incredibly common for a testator to require that their enslaved domestic help serve a family member or friend for a period of time before they would be manumitted. See Mummey, “Measuring the Margins,” 111–28.
53 McKee, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, 1312–1420, doc. 182, I:234.
54 For more on the dynamics between emancipated women and their former enslavers, as well as the idea that providing a dowry for a formerly enslaved women was an assertion of dominance and control, see Lauer, “From Slave to Wife,” 107–32; Mummy, “Measuring the Margins,” 121.
55 Vinyoles, La vida quotidiana a Barcelona, 140–43.
56 McKee, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, doc. 73, I:96–97.
57 Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 143–47, at 146.
58 McKee, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, doc. 156, I:198.
59 McKee, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, doc. 180, I:230–31.
60 Vinyoles, La vida quotidiana a Barcelona, 142. See also Barceló, Davant la mort, 177–81.
61 Archivo de Protocolos del Patriarca de Valencia (APPV), Protocolos, Miquel Arbucies no. 13899, Unfoliated (1416).
62 For more on women's pious bequests, see, among others, Cohn, “Renaissance Attachment to Things,” 989; Cossar, “‘A Good Woman’,” 126–28; Kelly Wray, Communities and Crisis, 42, 52, 228–29.
63 Reconsiderations of the burdens of illegitimacy include Byers, “From Illegitimate Son to Legal Citizen,” 643–63; Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility, esp. chapter 6: “Concubinage and Natural Daughters;” Kuehn, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence; McDougall, Royal Bastards. For the recognition and provisions made for illegitimate children in a father's will, see McKee, Uncommon Dominion, 83–86.
64 APPV, Protocolos, Joan Aguilar, no. 14901, fol. 61v–62r (1395–1396).
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Susan McDonough
Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor at Emory University, specializes in the study of gender, sexuality, and women's history in Iberia and the Mediterranean. Her research also focuses on the intersection of masculinity, violence, and sex. The author of Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Cornell, 2017) and co-editor of Women & Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2020), she has an article on gang rape and adolescent masculinity in the journal Medieval Feminist Forum (Spring 2021). Her current book project, supported by the Institute for Advanced Study (2018–2019) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2019–2020), is a comparative study of concubinous unions among the peasantry, urban poor, and merchant class across the late medieval Mediterranean. This research exposes the significant population of enslaved, single, married women, and widows, who by circumstance or choice, ended up in an informal union, weaving the experiences of women at the lowest levels of society into an account of medieval people who remained on the margins of marriage. Armstrong-Partida has also embarked on a new collaborative project on singlewomen—both enslaved and free—in the late medieval Mediterranean with fellow medievalist Susan McDonough; together they have written articles on women who lived on the spectrum of singleness, prostitute-concubines, and laboring class masculinity.
Michelle Armstrong-Partida
Susan McDonough, Associate Professor of History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, specializes in the study of gender and sexuality in the Latin Mediterranean. Her first book was Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval Marseille (Palgrave, 2013) and she is co-editor of Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honor of Paul Freedman (Brepols, 2017). Her published work includes articles in the Journal of Medieval History, the Journal of Women's History, History Compass, Gender & History, and Past & Present. She has received research support from the Newberry Library (2010–2011) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2019–2020). In addition to her collaborative work with medievalist Michelle Armstrong-Partida on Mediterranean singlewomen and prostitute-concubines, she is currently at work on a monograph exploring the role of sex workers as knowledge brokers in the port cities of the late medieval Mediterranean. Shifting attention away from their sex lives, this study examines how the women used institutions like notaries and law courts to stake out their community identities.