Author: Steven A. Epstein Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 9780807844984 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
Epstein takes a fresh look at the organization of labor in medieval towns and emphasizes the predominance of a wage system within them. He offers illuminating comment on a wide range of subjects_on guilds and guild organization, on women and Jews in the work force, on the value given labor, and on the sources of disaffection. His book presents a feast of themes in medieval social history. David Herlihy, Brown University
Author: Steven A. Epstein Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469626101 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
Relying on a broad range of printed and secondary sources, Wage Labor and Guilds charts the history of guilds from their antecedents in the Roman Empire to their 'crisis' in the fourteenth century. . . . As a much-needed synthesis, [the book] will serve students well.--Speculum "A thoughtful and wide-ranging contribution to the social and economic history of the High Medieval urban milieu.--Journal of Interdisciplinary History "Interesting and comprehensive. . . . A major accomplishment.--Journal of Economic History "Epstein takes a fresh look at the organization of labor in medieval towns and emphasizes the predominance of a wage system within them. He offers illuminating comment on a wide range of subjects--on guilds and guild organization, on women and Jews in the work force, on the value given labor, and on the sources of disaffection. His book presents a feast of themes in medieval social history.--David Herlihy, Brown University
Author: Sheilagh Ogilvie Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691217025 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 682
Book Description
"Guilds ruled many crafts and trades from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, and have always attracted debate and controversy. They were sometimes viewed as efficient institutions that guaranteed quality and skills. But they also excluded competitors, manipulated markets, and blocked innovations. Did the benefits of guilds outweigh their costs? Analyzing thousands of guilds that dominated European economies from 1000 to 1880, The European Guilds uses vivid examples and clear economic reasoning to answer that question. Sheilagh Ogilvie's book features the voices of honorable guild masters, underpaid journeymen, exploited apprentices, shady officials, and outraged customers, and follows the stories of the "vile encroachers"--Women, migrants, Jews, gypsies, bastards, and many others--desperate to work but hunted down by the guilds as illicit competitors. She investigates the benefits of guilds but also shines a light on their dark side. Guilds sometimes provided important services, but they also manipulated markets to profit their members. They regulated quality but prevented poor consumers from buying goods cheaply. They fostered work skills but denied apprenticeships to outsiders. They transmitted useful techniques but blocked innovations that posed a threat. Guilds existed widely not because they corrected market failures or served the common good but because they benefited two powerful groups--guild members and political elites."--Rabat de la jaquette.
Author: Maarten Prak Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 110849692X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
This comparative study of the European history of apprenticeship offers a comprehensive picture of occupational training before the Industrial Revolution.
Author: Bert De Munck Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351245767 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
This book presents a new view on the relation between labour and community through a focus on craft guilds. In the Southern Netherlands, occupational guilds were both powerful and governed by manufacturing masters, enabling the latter to imprint their mark upon urban society in an economic, socio-cultural and political way. While the urban community was deeply indebted to a corporative spirit and guild ethic originating in medieval Germanic and Christian traditions, guild-based artisans succeeded in being accepted as genuine political (and, hence, rational) actors – their political identity and agency being based upon their skills and trustworthiness. In the long run, this corporative spirit and power inexorably waned. Yet this book shows that an adequate understanding of the development of European modernity – i.e., proletarianisation and the emergence of a modern economy and modern economic and political thinking – requires taking seriously the ruins upon which it is build. These histories can actually be recounted as purifications of sorts, in which the economic was separated from the political, the individual from the social, and the transcendent from the material. While the religiously inspired corporative nature of the urban body politic waned, the urban artisans lost their credibility as political (and rational) actors.
Author: Barbara A. Hanawalt Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198042604 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
London became an international center for import and export trade in the late Middle Ages. The export of wool, the development of luxury crafts and the redistribution of goods from the continent made London one of the leading commercial cities of Europe. While capital for these ventures came from a variety of sources, the recirculation of wealth through London women was important in providing both material and social capital for the growth of London's economy. A shrewd Venetian visiting England around 1500 commented about the concentration of wealth and property in women's hands. He reported that London law divided a testator's property three ways allowing a third to the wife for her life use, a third for immediate inheritance of the heirs, and a third for burial and the benefit of the testator's soul. Women inherited equally with men and widows had custody of the wealth of minor children. In a society in which marriage was assumed to be a natural state for women, London women married and remarried. Their wealth followed them in their marriages and was it was administered by subsequent husbands. This study, based on extensive use of primary source materials, shows that London's economic growth was in part due to the substantial wealth that women transmitted through marriage. The Italian visitor observed that London men, unlike Venetians, did not seek to establish long patrilineages discouraging women to remarry, but instead preferred to recirculate wealth through women. London's social structure, therefore, was horizontal, spreading wealth among guilds rather than lineages. The liquidity of wealth was important to a growing commercial society and women brought not only wealth but social prestige and trade skills as well into their marriages. But marriage was not the only economic activity of women. London law permitted women to trade in their own right as femmes soles and a number of women, many of them immigrants from the countryside, served as wage laborers. But London's archives confirm women's chief economic impact was felt in the capital and skill they brought with them to marriages, rather than their profits as independent traders or wage laborers.
Author: Steven A. Epstein
Author: Steven A. Epstein
Author: Sheilagh Ogilvie
Author: Steven A. Epstein
Author: Georges François Renard
Author: Maarten Prak
Author: Bert De Munck
Author: Pierre Dockès
Author: Sylvia L. Thrupp
Author: Barbara A. Hanawalt