The women who had nothing and who found ways to survive anyway, often right under the noses of the authorities who tried very hard to stop them.

Picture a street, not a grand one, not a market square with stone arches and official stalls and licensed merchants announcing their wares to prosperous customers.

A narrow street in any medieval English or French or Flemish city you care to name.

Early morning before the official market opens, a woman is walking along it.

She carries a basket on her arm.

The basket contains eggs or cheese or small loaves of bread she baked before dawn or a few pennies worth of dried fish.

She’s going door todo.

She has no stall.

She has no license.

She almost certainly has no husband or has a husband who cannot earn enough to feed their children.

She has what is in the basket.

and she has what I think is one of the most quietly remarkable capacities in the entire history of human economic life.

She has learned to turn almost nothing into something.

This woman had a name in the Middle Ages.

She was called a hu.

The word hustster comes from the middle English huck meaning to haggle.

And here is a detail I want you to hold on to.

The word entered the English language around 1200 with the feminine word ending typical of occupations dominated by women huess because most huers were women.

This was so well understood at the time that the female ending was built directly into the word itself.

The word was not describing an anomaly.

It was describing a norm.

the Huxster and her close cousin, the regrator, a woman who bought goods at the official market price and resold them in smaller quantities in less regulated spaces to people who could not afford to buy in bulk were fixtures of medieval urban life.

They worked in the space between the official economy and the people who couldn’t access it.

And they were everywhere.

Before I go further, I want to ask you something, and I really mean this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.

What do you think survival actually looked like for a poor woman in medieval England? Not a widow of a merchant with some residual network and a little starting capital.

Not a nun with the church’s protection behind her.

Not a noble wife managing an estate while her husband was away at war.

A genuinely poor woman alone or with a husband who was ill or absent or insufficient with children in a city where the guilds would not take her as an apprentice.

Where the major trades were organized specifically to exclude women without formal credentials or family connections.

where the law of coveture meant that any husband she had technically owned her labor, where the formal market structure charged fees for stalls she couldn’t afford.

What did she do? She found a basket and she started walking.

The huers and regrators of medieval Europe appear most vividly in history, not in stories told about them, but in court records, because they were prosecuted regularly, persistently.

The medieval legal system had a specific set of offenses designed to regulate the food market for stalling, which meant intercepting goods before they reached the official market so you could buy them cheap.

Regrating which meant buying goods at market price and reselling them at a higher price in the same market or nearby and engrossing which meant buying up large quantities to create artificial scarcity.

All three were illegal.

All three were in practice fundamental strategies of survival for women with no other options.

The evidence from the elite jurisdiction records of the city of Norwich covering the 13th and 14th centuries shows women being regularly charged with breaking the size of ale, keeping back money from the sale of corn, and buying corn outside the city walls where taxes were not collected, either keeping it for their families or reselling it at a small profit.

Women listed as bakers, poulters, and brewers in the York records of 131 appear repeatedly as transgressors of burrow ordinances.

The same names appear year after year, the same small fines, the same offenses.

Here is the part of this that I find genuinely thoughtprovoking, and I have spent a lot of time with it.

In the records of the memorial court at Topcliffe in Yorkshire covering the period from 1316 to 1367, historians have counted 15 references to bread sizes, 75 references to Aaylor sizes, and dozens of recorded fines for violations of both.

The fines were typically 3 or 6 p, rarely more than 12, and they were recurring.

the same people year after year paying the same small fines for the same small violations.

One particular man Regginal Cavl was fined 12 p in 1316 for brewing contrary to the asai.

He was fined the same amount the following year.

His wife was separately fined 6 p for the same period.

They kept doing it.

The court kept finding them and they kept doing it.

There is a passage in a scholarly analysis of this record that is lodged in my mind and I want to share the idea with you even if I tell it in my own words.

The interpretation is this.

The recurring fines may not have been meant as deterrence at all.

They may have functioned as a de facto licensing system.

Pay your 6 p.

Continue selling your ale or your bread or your eggs.

Pay your 6 p again next year.

The lord of the manor collected a reliable revenue stream.

The woman with the basket kept her livelihood.

Neither party had any real interest in a different arrangement.

This is when you think about it a fairly sophisticated negotiated accommodation between official law and practical necessity.

The official record says illegal.

The practical reality says ongoing.

The fine says tolerated.

For the women who depended on this trade, that distinction between officially illegal and practically tolerated was the difference between eating and not eating.

I want to tell you about something that appears in Piers Plowman, a major 14th century English poem by William Langland.

In it, one of the allegorical characters, Avarice, the personification of greed, describes his wife, whom he calls Rose, the regrator.

Langland’s avarice boasts that Rose commonly cheated her customers.

She used false weights.

She sold Thindale by the cupful to poor people at the price of better ale.

Now Langland intended this as a moral condemnation.

Rose the regrator is not a sympathetic figure in his poem.

She is an example of dishonest female commerce.

But the historian who reads this passage in the context of everything else we know about these women cannot help noticing a few things.

First, the reference is casual.

Rose the regator is not an unusual figure that the poet needs to explain.

She is a recognizable type.

The reader is expected to know immediately what a female regrator is, how she operates, and what the common complaints about her are.

This is a portrait of something the medieval audience found entirely familiar.

Second, the specific practices described thinning the ale using imprecise weights were common survival strategies in a trade with extremely thin margins.

When you are selling small quantities of ale or bread at the absolute bottom of the market and your profit on each transaction is measured in fractions of a penny, the temptation to shade the quality slightly is very real.

This does not make it right, but it does make it comprehensible in a way that a purely moral reading misses.

And third, and this is the one that most interests me, the condemnation falls entirely on Rose.

Not on the economic system that drove her to this trade, not on the guild structures that excluded her from license commerce.

Not on the cover laws that gave her husband legal claim over whatever she earned.

Rose cheats.

Rose is greedy.

Rose is the problem.

The world that Rose is navigating, the narrow, exclusionary, legally stacked against her world, is simply the background, taken for granted, unremarkable, invisible.

And isn’t that in the end exactly how it was designed to be? The historian Marian Cowleski, who spent years analyzing the commercial records of late medieval exit, found something that crystallized this dynamic in stark numerical terms.

Women who appeared on their own in the exit courts without a husband as co-credititor or co-dtor had the lowest average debt values of all groups.

Lower than men without guild membership, lower than unenfranchised men who had no civic standing.

The fact of being female entirely by itself placed women at a disadvantage in local markets.

Not because of any individual failing, not because of dishonesty or incompetence or lack of effort, simply because of what they were.

And yet, and this is the part I keep returning to, they were there.

They were in the records.

They were buying and selling.

They were in debt and extending credit.

They were appearing in court, sometimes as plaintiffs, sometimes as defendants, sometimes as both.

accounting for only 6% of all creditors and debtors in the exit records from 1378 to 1388.

But there working with what they had in the margins in the spaces between the official structures with a basket and a root and the daily discipline of keeping the whole thing going.

There is a specific detail about the word huer that I want to leave you with because I think it says something important.

When the word traveled from medieval England to Scotland, it gained a slightly different meaning.

In Scots’s usage, a hu was specifically a person, usually a woman, who bought goods and watered them down or repackaged them in tiny quantities for resale to people who were too poor to buy the standard market units.

Think about what that means.

The hu was not selling to wealthy customers who’d been deceived.

She was selling to people who could not afford to buy a whole loaf, who could not afford a gallon of ale, who could only afford a cup full, who could only afford one egg.

The Huxster was operating at the absolute bottom of the market between poor suppliers and even poorer buyers, taking a fraction of a penny on each transaction, absorbing the risk on both ends, doing the work of distributing food to people who were otherwise simply not served by the official economy.

Was this sometimes done dishonestly? Yes.

Was it sometimes done with false weights or thinned products? probably more often than we would like.

But was it also at its core a service provided by people with nothing to people with almost nothing filling a genuine gap that the licensed gilded officially organized commercial world had no interest in filling? Absolutely.

And I think that double nature, the simultaneously precarious and essential, morally complicated and economically necessary quality of this kind of trade is something that deserves more than the word illegal stamped across it in a court record.

The women in those court records never wrote anything down about their own lives.

No letter survives explaining their reasoning.

No diary, no account book.

They exist as names attached to small fines.

Agnes, Isabel, Marjgerie, Joan.

Find three pints for regrating.

Find six pence for brewing contrary to the as find again the following year.

But there is one woman working in a different corner of this history who did leave a written record, who did explain her reasoning, who did articulate in her own voice what it meant to manage money and property and economic life as a woman in the Middle Ages with a specificity and an intelligence that still astonishes readers 500 years later.

Her name was Margaret Pastton, and the story of what she did and how she did it, and what it cost her through letters written from a house in Norfolk, while her husband spent months at a time away in London, is, I think, one of the most complete pictures we have of female economic intelligence at work in the medieval world.

Her name appears in history the way most medieval women’s names appear attached to a man’s.

Margaret Mountby, daughter of John Maltby of Norolk.

Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston I.

But the moment you actually read what she wrote, or rather the moment you read what she dictated, because Margaret never learned to write herself, the name stops mattering quite so much.

What matters is the voice, and the voice is extraordinary.

Margaret Paston was born around 1422 in Reedom, Norfolk, the only child of a comfortable landowning family.

Her father died when she were about 11, leaving her the sole heir to his estates.

Around 1441, she married John Pastton I, a lawyer, a landowner, a man with serious professional ambitions that required him to spend large portions of his time in London at the ins of court navigating the complex and frequently violent world of 15th century English property law, which left Margaret in Norfolk, managing everything for years at a time.

Over the course of her adult life, Margaret produced or directed more than 100 letters, more surviving letters than any other single person in the past archive, more than her husband, more than her sons, more than any other medieval English woman we know of.

The historian Diane Watt, who wrote a biography of Margaret published in recent years, called her the most prolific letter writer in medieval England.

And what is in those letters once you get past the opening phrases of formal 15th century courtesy is one of the most precise detailed unscentimental pictures of female economic management that survives from the entire Middle Ages.

Let me give you a sense of what Margaret’s world looked like.

It is the 1440s and 1450s in Norfolk.

England is in the middle of a period of severe political instability.

the years leading into and then through the Wars of the Roses when the two branches of the royal family, Lancaster and York, are locked in a conflict that periodically convulses the entire country.

In this environment, the ordinary mechanisms of law and order frequently break down.

Property disputes which were common enough in normal times become genuinely dangerous.

Powerful lords with armed retinues make land grabs.

Courts are manipulated.

Violence is used where legal arguments fail.

The Paston family is directly caught in this.

In 1448, the manner of Gresham, a property the past had purchased and were legally entitled to, was seized by Robert Hungerford, Lord Mullins, who had a disputed claim to it, and apparently decided that physical occupation was the more convenient argument.

He sent men to occupy the building.

John Pastton was in London.

Margaret was at Gresham.

She wrote to her husband, and the letter she sent is, I think, one of the most extraordinary documents of female composure under pressure that I have read from any century.

She described the situation calmly.

She assessed the numbers of men Lord Mullins had deployed.

She listed what the household had in the way of defensive resources, and then she made her request crossbows she specified and bolts for them and pole axes.

She asked for quarrels, the technical term for crossbow bolts, because she noted that the doors of the house were too low for longbowows to be used effectively inside.

This is a woman who, upon finding herself in what was functionally a siege situation, sat down, analyzed the architectural constraints of the building she was defending, and wrote her absent husband a tactical supply list calibrated to those constraints.

She was somewhere in her midents.

She had children, and she was asking for crossbow ammunition.

She did not ask Jon to come back.

She was managing.

Now, here is the thing I want you to understand about Margaret Pastton’s letters.

They are not, and this is important, they are not primarily dramatic.

The Gresham Siege is the kind of incident that catches a modern reader’s attention immediately because we are primed to notice physical conflict and crisis.

But the hundreds of letters that fill the spaces between those dramatic moments are something different.

They are the texture of management itself.

Margaret wrote to John about rents that were overdue, about tenants who were refusing to pay, and why, whether because of their own financial difficulties or because they were testing the family’s resolve during a period of disputed ownership or because there was a more complicated local dispute that needed untangling.

She wrote about land purchases Jon was considering from London, whether the price was right, whether the neighbors were reliable, what the local opinion was of the seller’s title.

She consulted local lawyers when Jon was unavailable.

She maintained the family’s relationships with influential people in Norfolk who could help or hinder their interests.

She reported on the political situation, the movements of powerful lords, the mood of local opinion, the intelligence she was gathering from conversations with people Jon would never hear from directly because he was 3 days ride away in London.

In one letter, she relays detailed information about the queen’s visit to Norwich.

The precise sequence of events who attended what was said to whom, with the matter-of-act thoroughess of someone who understood that this kind of current intelligence was valuable.

She was, in every practical sense, her husband’s agent in Norolk, his eyes and ears, his financial manager, his legal correspondent when local disputes required immediate action.

And she did all of this while raising seven children, while running a household, while navigating the social demands of her position as a gentle woman in a county where the family standing was both a resource and a thing to be constantly defended.

I want to stop here and sit with something for a moment because I think it is easy to read about Margaret Pastton and think, “Yes, capable woman, impressive, but this was just what wives did when husbands were absent.

” And in one sense that is correct.

We have discussed this already in the context of noble estate management.

The expectation that a woman of the propertied class could step into administrative roles when circumstances required it.

But I think there is something specifically interesting about Margaret’s case that goes beyond the category.

It is this Margaret Pastton could not write.

She dictated her letters to scribes, family servants, her chaplain, sometimes her sons, and she dictated them with a vocabulary and a conceptual precision that is frankly remarkable.

She used specific legal terminology correctly.

She tracked multiple simultaneous disputes with clarity about which witnesses had said what, which documents supported, which claims, which arguments were strongest in which courts.

She distinguished between what Jon needed to know immediately and what could wait.

She exercised judgment consistently for decades about when to act on her own initiative and when to wait for instruction.

All of this without formal legal training, without formal schooling beyond what a 15th century gentle woman would have received, without the ability to write anything herself.

Knowledge was in her head.

The ability to analyze, remember, prioritize and communicate it was entirely hers.

And the letters are the evidence, more than a hundred of them, spanning more than four decades.

There is a line in a scholarly introduction to the past and letters that has stayed with me since I first read it.

It notes that Margaret was as ready to superintend the defense of her house against armed attack as she was to give directions for the replenishing of the storoom and the purchase of cloth for her children’s clothing.

I love that sentence because of what it implies about the range of things a medieval woman of her class was expected to be competent in simultaneously.

There was no separation between the military emergency and the household economy.

Both were her domain.

Both required the same kind of steady, practical, experienced judgment, and she brought the same tone to both.

One of the things that becomes clear if you read Margaret’s letters carefully is that she was not simply executing instructions.

She was making decisions.

Sometimes Jon gave her general guidance.

Keep an eye on this situation.

Collect what you can from this tenant.

Consult this lawyer if anything comes up.

But the day-to-day reality of 15th century Norfolk meant that by the time a letter could reach London, and a reply returned 3 days or more had typically passed, situations changed, opportunities closed, threats escalated.

Margaret had to act in the interval with her own judgment on incomplete information, knowing that whatever she did would have legal and financial consequences, and she acted.

Sometimes she was wrong, and she said so plainly in subsequent letters this didn’t work.

Here is what happened instead.

Sometimes she was right, and the matter was resolved by the time Jon’s instructions arrived.

Sometimes she told Jon with a certain dry precision that she had already done the thing he was about to suggest.

I find that last category the most personally satisfying to read.

The letter that essentially says yes.

I thought of that I handled it here is what happened.

Not triumphant, not self- congratulatory, just factual.

The way a good professional reports to a colleague.

I want to tell you about a particular moment in the past story that I think crystallizes something important about how Margaret navigated her position.

In 1466, John Pasten I died.

He died with the family’s most significant dispute, the inheritance of Caster Castle and the Fastolf estate still unresolved.

Several major land owners, including the Duke of Norolk, were contesting the Paston claim.

Jon’s eldest son, also named John, took over the management of the legal battle.

But the eldest son was frequently at the court of King Edward IVth, frequently away, frequently in Margaret’s cleareyed assessment, not as focused on the family’s interests in Norfolk as the situation required.

She said so directly in writing.

She wrote to her son that he was not shouldering his proper responsibility.

She laid out specifically what was at risk, what actions were needed, and what the consequences of further inaction would be.

She was at this point in her mid4s, widowed with adult children who sometimes frustrated her considerably, and she was still doing what she had always done, tracking the situation, assessing the risks, communicating the analysis, trying to get the people around her to act appropriately.

The scholar Joel Rosenthal, who wrote a study of Margaret Paston’s inner life, made an observation that I keep returning to.

He suggested that Margaret represents something closer to a conventional medieval woman than the more famous female figures of her era, the mystics, the queens, the exceptional individuals who appear in history precisely because they were unusual.

Margaret was not unusual.

Margaret was competent in ways that her society both depended on and preferred not to acknowledge.

She was doing what many women of her class were doing.

We just happen to have her letters and that I think is the deepest thing the past letters offer us.

They survive because John Pastton kept them as potential legal evidence.

They survived because after his death, Margaret reminded her sons that their father had valued his writings more than his movable goods.

They survived because a local antiquarian found them rotting in the munament room of a crumbling countryhouse in the 18th century and recognized what they were.

In other words, they survive almost accidentally.

A small miracle of preservation in a world where most evidence of women’s economic lives simply does not exist.

How many Margarets were there who left no letters, who managed similar estates, resolved similar disputes, made similar decisions in the gaps between their husband’s absences, and left nothing that could be found.

The answer, I am quite certain, is a great many.

Margaret Pastton’s letters are not the record of an exception.

They are the record of a norm that was almost never recorded.

There is one more thing I want to tell you about Margaret before we move on.

She never learned to write.

This has always struck me as significant.

Here is a woman who produced through dictation, through the intermediary of scribes, who transcribed her words more surviving correspondence than any other woman of her age in England, who managed complex legal and financial situations through the written word over distances across decades, who understood perfectly well that documents were power, who reminded her children of this explicitly, who recognized that her husband’s letters were evidence as much as communic communication and she herself could not form the letters on the page.

Her words had to pass through someone else’s hand to reach the record.

Think about how much intelligence, how much judgment, how much sheer organizational capacity existed in that woman’s mind and had no direct path to permanence.

Had to rely on the willingness of a son or a servant to sit down and write as she spoke.

had to rely on the survival of those papers through generations of storage, neglect, and eventual discovery.

We got lucky with Margaret.

We got lucky and we got more than 100 letters.

Imagine what we did not get.

Something that does survive from the medieval period.

Rare and fragile and genuinely astonishing in its own way is the work of a woman who managed to turn her words directly into permanence.

Not through a scribe, not through the accident of legal preservation, but through the deliberate determined act of writing, and not just writing for herself or writing letters, writing books, writing arguments.

writing in the 1400s a sustained historically grounded rhetorically powerful case for the idea that women had always been capable had always been significant and that the stories history told about them were incomplete and in many cases simply wrong.

Her name was Christine Depar.

And the story of what she built in the years following her husband’s death, working alone in Paris with ink and parchment and a mind that refused to be quiet is where we are going next.

Somewhere in Paris in the year 142, a woman is sitting alone in a room full of books.

She has a candle, she has ink, she has parchment, and she has a problem.

The problem is not on the surface a financial one.

By 142, Christine Depision has already solved her financial problem.

Solved it in a way that had no real precedent in European history.

For a woman without family wealth, without a patron’s permanent salary, without a guild’s protection, she had solved it with words.

But now she’s encountered something harder than poverty.

She has encountered an argument she cannot let go of.

She’s sitting in her study reading a book by a man named Atheus, a 13th century cleric who had written at length about how women make men’s lives miserable.

How they are deceitful and lustful and intellectually inferior.

How learned men, great learned men, many of them had said as much and said it again and repeated it across centuries of authoritative text.

and Christine Depan, who has spent the last 13 years fighting her way out of poverty through intelligence and labor, who has produced poetry sophisticated enough to be commissioned by dukes, and a king who has been praised by contemporary intellectuals and received into their circles on the basis of her work alone.

This woman sitting alone with Matheus and his contempt begins to feel something she will later describe precisely.

She feels ashamed.

She begins, as she writes, to despise herself and the whole of her sex as an aberration in nature.

And then she puts the book down and she picks up a pen.

To understand why Christine Depazan matters to the story we’ve been telling, the hidden economic lives of medieval women, we need to start not with her books, but with her life.

And her life began in Venice in 1364.

Her father was Thomas Deisan, originally Tomaso de Benuto Ditzano, a physician and astrologer who received an offer most academics of his era could only dream of a position as court astrologer and physician to Charles Vance.

He moved his family to Paris when Christine was about 4 years old.

And there, growing up in the orbit of the royal court, in a household that maintained a library and valued learning, Christine received something that was genuinely unusual for a girl of her social class and era of serious education.

Her mother, we are told, had reservations.

What use was all this learning for a girl who would eventually marry her father overruled her mother? And Christine would later reflect on this in one of those passages that reads like a quiet personal thank you across 600 years that whatever she became was rooted in what her father had given her by insisting she learn.

In 1379, when Christine was about 15, she married Etien Du Castell, a notary and royal secretary, a good man by all accounts, a man who seems to have genuinely supported his wife’s intellectual interests.

For about 10 years, everything was stable.

They had children.

They had the comfort of her position connected to the royal court.

And then in 1388, her father died.

The following year 1389, Etienne died of plague.

He died while traveling with the king in Bovet.

He was 25 years old.

Christine was 25.

She was left with three children, a widowed mother and niece, no income, a husband’s estate tangled in legal complications, and as she would later write, no knowledge of how her husband had been paid, what he earned, or how to negotiate with the bureaucracy that owed his salary.

I want to pause on that detail because I think it is one of the most painfully honest things any medieval woman ever committed to writing about her own life.

She wrote years later that she had not been able to spend her early years learning what would have been useful to her later on, particularly how to look after her husband’s financial affairs after his death.

Read that again.

She had an education her own mother thought was unnecessary.

She had access to one of the finest court libraries in Europe.

She knew history, philosophy, poetry, rhetoric, and she did not know her own husband’s salary.

She did not know how he was paid.

She had no idea how to recover what was legally owed to his estate.

This was not ignorance.

This was the specific intentional gap in women’s education that the entire structure of medieval gender relations produced and maintained.

You did not need to know your husband’s finances.

That was not your domain until your husband died.

And then there was no one left who knew.

Christine spent the next decade fighting through courts and lawsuits to recover what she could.

She sold land.

She wrote poetry as distraction from grief and then discovered with what must have been a certain bewildered surprise that people would pay for it.

By 1400 her poetry was known not just in Paris but in England and at the court of Milan.

She had become through sheer necessity and talent the first woman in European history who earned her entire living by writing, not supported by a church, not maintained by a single noble patron, writing commercial writing for multiple clients, negotiating fees, managing commissions, producing work to deadline as a profession, as a business.

Here is what I find most remarkable about Christine Depazan’s career viewed through the specific lens of this video.

She was not just a writer.

She was an entrepreneur.

In the medieval world, professional authors did not sell books to publishers the way we understand publishing today.

There was no mass market.

There was no printing press in Christine’s lifetime that comes half a century later.

What? There was a small, wealthy, literate aristocratic class that wanted books, was willing to pay for fine manuscripts, and could be cultivated as patrons.

Christine cultivated them.

She maintained simultaneous professional relationships with multiple ducal courts.

The Duke of Orleene, the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Berry, playing them against each other with enough skill that no single patron owned her exclusively.

When the English king Henry IV offered her a place at his court, she declined.

When the Duke of Milan made a similar offer, she declined.

She stayed in Paris, maintained her independence, and kept producing.

She personally supervised the production of her manuscripts, overseeing the illuminations, the painted illustrations that were an essential part of a luxury book’s value.

She had preferences about artistic style.

Scholars have documented that she favored what they describe as a direct clear Italian style over the more elaborate decorative French workshop style of her day.

This is the language of someone who understood that her product had an aesthetic as well as a literary dimension and who made deliberate choices about it.

She was by any modern definition a creative entrepreneur managing her own brand.

41 known works of poetry and pros, commissions from royalty, copies of her books held in the personal libraries of Europe’s leading intellectuals.

She did all of this starting from near poverty in a society that had no structural support whatsoever for a woman who wanted to earn a living by her mind.

But the reason Christine Depan belongs specifically in the story of women and money in the Middle Ages is not just her career.

It is what she wrote.

Around 145, she completed the work she is best known for today.

The book of the city of ladies.

It is a strange and wonderful book written in the form of an allegorical vision.

Christine is sitting in her study.

This is autobiographical reading misogynist texts and feeling increasingly distressed by the accumulated weight of male authority insisting that women are inferior, deceitful and unfit for education or serious responsibility.

And then three allegorical figures appear to her.

Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, Lady Justice.

They instruct her to build a city, an allegorical city with women as its inhabitants.

The walls and towers of this city are built from examples, real examples, historical examples of women who had governed, commanded armies, practiced medicine, written poetry, managed estates, administered justice, conducted trade, demonstrated intellectual capability at the highest level.

Christine is systematic.

She is methodical.

She goes through history.

She goes through mythology.

She goes through the records that existed in the libraries available to her, and she assembles a case, not an emotional case, not a complaint, a documented, argued, evidence-based case for the proposition that women’s apparent inferiority was not a fact of nature, but a consequence of exclusion.

If women seemed less capable in learning, it was because they had been denied access to learning.

If women seemed less capable in governance, it was because they had been denied access to governance.

If the historical record seemed thin, it was because the historical record had been written by men who had no interest in preserving it.

I want to be very clear that I am not retroactively calling Christine a feminist.

In the modern sense, that word carries a full conceptual framework that belongs to its own time.

But I am saying that the argument she was making in 145 was so structurally ahead of its moment that it would not be made again with comparable systematic force for several hundred years and she was making it for money because she had to eat.

The companion volume she produced immediately after the treasure of the city of ladies is in many ways even more interesting to me personally and I want to explain why.

The book of the city of ladies is the philosophical argument.

The treasure of the city of ladies is the practical manual.

It was written for women of all estates.

Christine was explicit about this covering.

Everyone from queens and princesses at one end down through ladies at court, wives of merchants and artisans, and all the way to women living in poverty.

For each group, Christine wrote practical advice.

How to manage a household’s finances.

How to deal with difficult situations when a husband is absent.

How to maintain relationships with the people your family depends on economically.

How to handle disputes.

How to protect your reputation which in the medieval world was a financial asset as much as a social one.

She told noble women quite directly that they should learn the accounts of their estates, that it was shameful to be ignorant of one’s own financial position.

She told widows to be strong, constant, and wise, not to collapse into grief while creditors circled.

She told merchant wives to understand their husbands businesses well enough to step in and manage them if needed.

She was writing from experience.

All of it.

There is one passage I want to share with you in spirit.

if not in exact words because it has lodged in my mind since the first time I encountered it.

In Christine’s vision, an autobiographical work she wrote around the same time she describes a moment of being confronted by a man who told her that educated women were unbecoming because they were so rare and unusual.

And Christine’s response was this, that ignorant men are more offensive.

They’re even more unbecoming because they are so very common.

I have thought about that line more times than I can count.

The quiet precision of it, the way she refuses to accept the terms of the insult and redirects it entirely.

This is a woman who learned to argue in the environment of the royal court in the company of the finest intellects of late medieval France while simultaneously managing lawsuits and children and manuscripts and patron relationships and the constant low-grade crisis of not having enough money.

She learned to think clearly under pressure and the clarity shows in every line.

Let me tell you where her story ends because it ends in a way that I find unexpectedly moving.

Around 1418 with France in the middle of a brutal period of war and political chaos, the Hundred Years War was grinding on Paris had been captured.

Christine withdrew to the convent at Pi where her daughter was a nun.

She stopped publishing.

She essentially disappeared from public life.

For more than a decade, she wrote nothing or nothing that has survived.

And then in 1429, when she was in her mid60s and had been in retirement for over a decade, something happened that pulled her back.

A young girl from a village in northeastern France showed up at the Doof’s court claiming a divine mission to drive the English out of France.

Joon of Arc Christine Depan wrote a poem about her.

It was the last work she produced.

It is the only poem written about Joan of Arc by a contemporary who was alive during Joan’s lifetime.

And in it, Christine celebrated Joan not only as a military and spiritual phenomenon, but as proof of something she had been arguing for 30 years, that what women could do had never been the limit of what women were allowed to do.

That the records of female capability were incomplete.

Not because the capability was absent, but because the world had spent centuries choosing not to look.

Christine Depan died around 1430.

The Book of the City of Ladies stayed in print in various editions for over a century, and then it disappeared, not by accident.

As Christine’s work circulated, male printers began to question her authorship.

She was, after all, a woman.

She had signed her books with her own name, included her own portrait in illuminated manuscripts referred to herself by name throughout her texts.

But as time passed and the world changed, the idea that a woman had written this kind of sustained scholarly ambitious work became apparently less credible, not more.

Her authorship was disputed.

Her work went out of fashion.

It was not translated into English again until the late 20th century.

600 years after she wrote it, scholars had to explain who she was.

She had spent her life arguing that the historical record under represented women, and then history demonstrated her point by almost losing her.

The stories we’ve been following through this video.

The alew wife and her brewing pots.

The silk women petitioning parliament.

The abbis managing her feudal lands.

The huster with her basket.

Margaret past dictating letters in the middle of a land dispute.

And now Christine at her desk with ink and argument and a city to build all of these stories converge on the same fundamental question.

Not what could women do in the Middle Ages, but what did they do when no one was watching closely enough to write it down? And that question has one more chapter we have not yet reached.

Because the clearest evidence of what women were actually doing financially, economically in the most practical sense does not come from their skills or their petitions or their books.

It comes from the documents they produced at the very end of their lives when they finally legally with the church’s blessing had the right to say what they owned, what they had earned, and who it should go to when they were gone.

It comes from their wills.

Imagine you are dying.

You are lying in bed, probably in the room where you have spent most of your life, and beside you is a notary or a parish cler with ink and parchment.

The church is present because in the Middle Ages, writing your will was also a religious act, a preparation of the soul.

And for a brief legally recognized moment, you’re given permission to say what you own, to say who should have it, to name in your own words in front of witnesses what your life amounted to in the material world.

For most medieval women, this was one of the only moments in their entire lives when the law looked at them directly and said, “Speak not through your father, not through your husband, through yourself.

” And what they said, the specific ordinary particular things they said is among the most revealing evidence we have of what women’s economic lives in the Middle Ages actually looked like beneath the official surface of legal silence.

Wills are strange documents.

They are formulaic.

They follow patterns, use legal language, repeat certain phrases across centuries.

But inside the formula, there are the things people actually cared about.

And when women made wills in medieval Europe, the things they named were sometimes surprising and sometimes heartbreaking, and sometimes both at once.

A gown, a cooking pot, a house to a friend, six dishes, six pitches, two platters, a puter jug, a cauldron, a best cooking pot, a cloak, all bequeathed by one woman in Avenue in 1354, to a friend named Aseline, a rosary of amber to one woman, a bodice to another, a tunic to a granddaughter, a portable altar to a friend, a choir book, and the best cloak to another.

These were not wealthy women disposing of grand estates.

These were ordinary women carefully dividing ordinary things.

And the care with which they did it tells us something important about what those things were worth, not just in money, but in meaning.

Let me start with a number that I think reframes this entire conversation.

In 1371, the city of Aignor in the south of France organized a census.

It was a fairly routine administrative document, a list of heads of household for tax and governance purposes.

The census recorded the names of more than 3,820 heads of household.

Of those, 563 were female.

563 women who were heads of their own households in a single medieval city in a single year.

The historian Joel Roller Coaster, who has spent years studying Avignon’s medieval records, is clear about what this means.

These were not high status women.

These were not great ladies of the nobility.

These were individuals scarcely remembered by history who left only traces in administrative documents.

Women who rented rooms, women who kept shops, women who managed small properties, women who were by the definition of the census itself the people responsible for a household, not almost a tenth of the population, but a significant visible recorded publicly acknowledged presence in the economic life of the city.

And they were there in 1371.

They were there in other years, too.

The census just happened to survive.

The wills are where it gets intimate.

The historian Rolo Costa has studied approximately 60 women’s testaments preserved in Avenueong covering the late medieval period.

And the picture they paint is both legally interesting and deeply personal.

Women in the south of France occupied a specific legal position.

Since the 12th century, women who were not under a father’s or husband’s direct control, widows in particular, and older unmarried daughters in some circumstances, had been considered what the legal documents call sui urus, capable of managing their own legal affairs, capable of disposing of their possessions as they chose.

This was not universal across medieval Europe.

It was regional.

It was more developed in the urban naterial culture of southern France and Italy than in the common law tradition of England, for example.

But it was real, and the wills that survive show women using this freedom with a kind of purposeful specific intelligence that really rewards careful reading.

In 1354, a woman named Gassand Reo of X made her will.

She left a house to a friend.

She left kitchen equipment, specific kitchen equipment, six dishes, six pitches, two platters, a putter jug, a cauldron, her best cooking pot to another woman.

She left a cloak to that same woman.

She gave an amber rosary to one woman, a bodice to another, a tunic to a granddaughter.

To a different friend, she gave a portable altar for prayers, and an embroidered blanket.

To another a choir book, and her best cloak or fur.

Now, I want to think about this list for a moment.

Not about its emotional content, though it is genuinely moving that a woman’s last act was to think carefully about who would need what after she was gone.

I want to think about it as an economic document.

Everything on that list was handmade.

In the medieval world, clothing was not mass- prodduced.

A cloak was not an inexpensive item you bought off a rack.

It represented hours of labor, spinning, weaving, cutting, sewing.

A decent cloak could represent weeks of a craftsman’s wages.

A furlined one was a significant asset.

The kitchen equipment was equally meaningful.

Every pot, every picture, every pan had been acquired over a lifetime and represented real value.

When Gassand Deno divided these things among her female friends and family, she was not just expressing affection.

She was making real financial decisions about the distribution of real assets.

She knew exactly what everything was worth.

She allocated accordingly, and she chose specifically and deliberately to give most of it to women.

In another avenue will from 13173 decades earlier than Gassen’s a woman named Bartell Totos made a will that is to my mind one of the most socially sophisticated documents of female economic agency I have encountered from the entire medieval period circumstances gave her something to work with.

She was the widow of a fishmonger described by historians who study the period as usually a profitable occupation.

She had money and she used it with what I can only describe as strategic generosity.

She left funds to the Dominican friars including bequest to the prior the boss of her brother’s order.

Read that she rewarded the brother’s supervisor.

She was thinking about her brother’s professional position within his institution and using her will to strengthen it.

She provided money for charities and for the repair of two bridges over the Ron River.

She donated support to provide food and clothing to all the nuns convents in the city.

She left rental income to a niece who was a Benedicting nun, and she requested that her own clothes be cut up her personal garments and made into habits for nuns and lurggical vestments for the church.

The last instruction is the one that stops me every time.

Not just charity, transformation.

She wanted what had clothed her body to become what clothed the religious life of women who had no means of their own.

It is a gesture of such deliberate continuity, the material of one life becoming the fabric of others that I find it difficult to read without feeling something.

I want to step back from the individual wills for a moment and look at what the population of women’s wills taken together tells us because the pattern is very specific and the pattern matters.

Across the surviving wills from this period in England and France and the Low Countries, historians have documented several consistent features of female testimeamentary practice.

Women bequeathed clothing far more frequently than men.

This sounds trivial.

It is not.

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