Women’s Presence and Absence in Late Medieval Catalan Notarial Records

Although women were approximately half the population of late medieval Europe, they appear much less frequently than men in what are the most common and most commonly analyzed secular records from this period, notarial acts. In this paper, I explore what can be said about medieval women’s economic activities in late medieval Catalonia, based on their presence and absence in notarial sources, through three methods. Firstly, I examine the appearances of all people in the 7,800 acts from a medium Catalan town (Puigcerdà) during one fourteenth-century year, 1321-2. Secondly, I discuss cases in which a blank space is left for a woman’s name, but her name is never included, indicating she did not swear to uphold the contract. I argue that the medieval Catalan laws or customs made it financially advantageous for medieval families to actively exclude women from certain types of notarial acts. Finally, I discuss whether it is possible to make an argument from absence, and argue that, in some cases, it is possible to use women’s absence from certain kinds of notarial records to infer their likely participation in alternative forms of economic activity. Specifically, I outline how, in the case of late-medieval Puigcerdà, women’s disappearance from artisanal apprenticeships in the same (late-medieval) period as the rapid development of cloth-production may in fact indicate that women were turning in greater numbers towards spinning. This paper not only illustrates women’s activities in this community during the middle ages, but outlines methods for how we can use both women’s presence and absence in notarial sources to understand and narrate women’s experiences.