This book examines the roles of women in a medieval town of the thirteenth century. Rebecca Winer's approach is distinctive in working to place women within an extended network of social hierarchies, relationships, and affiliations. The stated aim of this study is "to reconstruct the gender system in place in this thirteenth-century town, focusing on how a woman's social rank, age/marital status, and religion determined her economic and legal options in this society" (2). Winer places particular emphasis on the role of religious affiliation as a key determiner of a woman's permitted social roles, along with the more frequently discussed issues of rank and marital status. The book therefore gives substantial attention to both Christian and Jewish women in the Mediterranean town of Perpignan, and gives a sizable share to the Muslim female population of the town as well. As such, the book contributes to several ongoing scholarly conversations. First, its focus on women offers a distinctive perspective on discussions of convivencia and other aspects of inter-religious interactions in the medieval Mediterranean. In this, Winer explicitly draws on David Nirenberg's work on the role of women in navigating relationships between religious groups, particularly in her discussion of the Muslim servant population. Second, the book offers evidence suggesting a new point of view on gender in the Mediterranean. Winer's concentration on women's "commercial and legal life" (3), contrasts the evidence from Perpignan with more familiar discussions of women in medieval Italy and southern France, illustrating how differences in legal framework and social setting shaped gender roles in distinctive ways. Finally, Winer throughout demonstrates a concern with issues of motherhood, both ideological and practical, examining the roles of widowed Christian and Jewish women as guardians of their children, and the role of enslaved Muslim women as wet nurses in Christian and Jewish households.
Winer builds her reconstruction through detailed study of notarial registers from the town of Perpignan from the second half of the thirteenth century. The geographical and temporal scope of the work are tightly defined, which means that the samples of wills, contracts, and other legal documents used are small, often supplying only one or two dozen examples of each phenomenon under discussion. The focused approach, however, permits detailed discussion of each interesting case. Winer also skillfully draws connections among the various individual and family groups mentioned, tracing members of a single family across several types of documentation. Such connections lend cohesiveness and help reconstruct the social environment of medieval Perpignan. The small samples are also buttressed with additional discussion of Perpignan society, which addresses the question of how typical the examples are.
Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on Christian women. The first of these focuses on a Christian woman's relationship to her two families: her birth family and her marital family. Much of the discussion is based on the distinctive legal environment of thirteenth-century Perpignan, in which Visigothic law determined customary practices of inheritance, but was becoming integrated with the norms of Roman law. According to Winer, this placed a woman in a position of having significant obligations to both her birth and marital families. The blend of inheritance principles required that female children should inherit shares of the parental estate, while allowing parents to protect larger shares for sons through a variety of legal mechanisms. Despite women's apparent access to property, Winer notes that "women were an important conduit for property but controlled relatively little of it themselves" (45). Instead of controlling their own property, women passed it on to their husbands and children. Winer also illustrates how motherhood could give women greater legal autonomy, but also imposed customary limitations on women's agency, especially once their children became adults.
Chapter 3 continues examining some of the themes of motherhood, property, and legal agency through a study of widowed mothers who acted as their children's legal guardians. Winer demonstrates convincingly that this was the most publicly active role most women would ever play, since Catalan customary law emphasized the appropriateness of mothers as guardians of their children's estates. However, it was also a role with serious challenges and limitations: the demands of the deceased father's testament placed financial strains on inexperienced guardians, while fears about the children being defrauded forced their mothers to act alone and remain unmarried. Throughout this chapter, Winer contrasts the Perpignan evidence to Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's discussion of Florentine "cruel mothers" (48, 55, 74), concluding that criticism of widowed mothers proceeded from fears of medieval society's inadequate social supports.
The following two chapters apply the same division of topics to Jewish women. This approach is a little repetitive, with regular cross- referencing to the earlier chapters on Christians. In this discussion, Winer refers to responsa and other prescriptive sources when appropriate, but does not rely on them entirely. Her major sources are notarial registers, marriage contracts, wills, and other legal instruments that document Jewish practice. Through these, she demonstrates that the Jewish women in Perpignan, like Christians, retained important ties to their birth families. She also shows that they were less active in commerce and lending than Jewish women in northern Europe. In chapter 5, the situation of Jewish widows as guardians offers interesting contrasts to that of Christians; where widowed Christian mothers were expected to act without assistance, widowed Jewish mothers acted in consultation with male relatives and community elders, who formed an influential guardianship panel. Winer suggests that this state of affairs rendered many Jewish widows successful guardians, while at the same time barring other women from guardianship at all (125). This chapter also raises intriguing issues about the influence of Christian law on Jewish practice.
The final chapter examines Muslim women in Perpignan. Such women were typically enslaved domestic servants. Winer surveys slavery in Perpignan as "a feminized domestic institution" (14), taking a sympathetic attitude toward this group of subordinated and often harshly-treated women. She contrasts the treatment of enslaved women in Perpignan with that elsewhere in the Mediterranean, noting that, though Perpignan was far from the frontier, fears of Muslim activity ran high and enslaved Muslims were rarely freed. She also devotes considerable attention to the paradoxical state of Muslim wet nurses, feared and subjugated yet entrusted with small and highly valued members of the household. Enslaved Muslim women typically appear only in passing in surviving thirteenth-century sources. This chapter is a fresh and intriguing look at their situation.
A brief concluding section to the last chapter suggests some interesting directions for further research. I would have liked to see a more substantial conclusion that pulled all of the strands of discussion together into a cohesive whole, but overall, the book succeeds in its aim of reconstructing the gender system of medieval Perpignan. It certainly succeeds in examining and comparing the situations of women of different religious affiliations, illustrating the importance of those affiliations in determining women's roles. Winer demonstrates skill at drawing conclusions from legal contracts and other documents of practice. Her use of engrossing details, and her careful yet sympathetic approach, encourage empathy with, as well as analysis of, the situations of medieval women.