For more than one hundred years; from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth; Paris was the only western European town north of the Mediterranean basin to produce luxury silk cloth. What was the nature of the Parisian silk industry? How did it get there? And what do the answers to these questions tell us? According to Sharon Farmer; the key to the manufacture of silk lies not just with the availability and importation of raw materials but with the importation of labor as well. Farmer demonstrates the essential role that skilled Mediterranean immigrants played in the formation of Paris's population and in its emergence as a major center of luxury production. She highlights the unique opportunities that silk production offered to women and the rise of women entrepreneurs in Paris to the very pinnacles of their profession. The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris illuminates aspects of intercultural and interreligious interactions that took place in silk workshops and in the homes and businesses of Jewish and Italian pawnbrokers. Drawing on the evidence of tax assessments; aristocratic account books; and guild statutes; Farmer explores the economic and technological contributions that Mediterranean immigrants made to Parisian society; adding new perspectives to our understanding of medieval French history; luxury trade; and gendered work.
#6947348 in Books University of Pennsylvania Press 2003-10-24Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 8.94 x .89 x 6.82l; 1.00 #File Name: 0812237447208 pages
Review
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. A Major ContributionBy Andrew RieserHistorian Carol Faulkner has made a vital contribution to the growing literature on women and state formation in the United States. Years before they gained the vote; we now understand; women activists pressured the government on issues like temperance; abolition; and education reform. From their efforts emerged new theories of government's role in preserving social welfare; theories that would later underpin the reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal.But while we know a great deal about antebellum reformers like Catherine Beecher; still more about Progressive-Era figures like Margaret Sanger; much remains unknown about the generation of women's activists who came of age in the 1860s and 1870s. Their efforts have for too long been overshadowed by the great cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction; and by the tendency to view both as momentous battles between white men about black men over "men's issues" such as civil rights and free labor.Enter Carol Faulkner and her exciting new book Women's Radical Reconstruction. This book does far more simply renovate the tired old stereotype of the stern Yankee schoolmarm. It also illustrates how the debates sparked by the campaign for free labor were themselves thoroughly gendered. Women's rights activists found themselves in conflict with some male Freedmen's Bureau officials; who viewed their concerns as nettlesome distractions. Faulkner's insights into Reconstruction might be compared to Sara Evans's insights into the modern civil rights movement in Personal Politics-i.e.; another instance in which middle-class women; brought together on in oppose the oppression of others; become newly conscious of their own oppression.Lucidly written and packed with vivid vignettes-and most importantly; at 200 pages; short- Women's Radical Reconstruction is an excellent book for undergraduate courses in both women's history and Civil War and Reconstruction. I strongly recommend it.
