All the Single Ladies: Single Women in the Late Medieval Mediterranean

In this paper, we take on a long-entrenched assumption among historians of women and gender that there were two distinct marital regimes in northern and southern Europe. In 1965 the demographer John Hajnal argued that a distinctive northwestern European marriage pattern emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries when a large population of unmarried men and women married in their early to late twenties, and formed their own household rather than join a multi-generational household with several older married couples. The corollary to this argument concerning the later age for marriage in northwest Europe and its advancement was the assertion that women in southern Europe married young and universally. Historians have embraced this paradigm and repeated it over and over again. This has led to harmful assumptions about the Mediterranean region as less developed or “less European” than the north and entirely discounted the existence and experience of women enslaved throughout the Mediterranean region. The problem is, the archives dotting the port cities of the Mediterranean do not bear this out. Based on our current findings, notaries and judicial officials in medieval Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, Marseille, Palermo, Venice, Famagusta, and Crete made note of women who were unmarried owning property, buying, selling and manumitting enslaved people, appointing procurators, committing crimes, and making wills. Many of these women were enslaved or manumitted from slavery. Historians have simply overlooked them. This paper reintegrates the experiences of singlewomen, both enslaved and free, into the daily life of the medieval Mediterranean. Understanding how these women made community, survived economically with very limited means, and participated in the legal and notarial cultures of their cities will reframe what we know about women’s options outside of marriage in the medieval past.