Gender, Scale, and Dirty Work in Roman and Frankish Textile Workshops

This paper investigates how premodern economic structures and strategies of pooling laborers shaped attitudes towards labor. In particular, it considers how both late-Roman and Carolingian elites implemented patterns of state-run textile production in similar ways, but in so doing, provoked different moral anxieties. In both the Roman world of Diocletian and the Frankish lands under Charlemagne, the needs of the state necessitated large-scale production of textiles in factory settings. Roman gynaecea and Frankish genitia pooled dozens or hundreds of laborers to produce textiles; though deemed necessary, these spaces also became sites of moral anxiety for reasons of status, scale, and gender. Roman gynaecea were stigmatized for associations with servility and penal labor, and those within them faced increasing legal strictures in Late Antiquity. By contrast, early medieval invective towards genitia was gendered. The women within them were said to be gossips, weavers of wicked magic, or even prostitutes. Using legal, literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence, I argue that while both gynaecea and genitia served economic ends in similar ways (vertical or top-down labor pooling), and though both challenged expectations about the proper, domestic space of textile work, the inherent moral hazards that were expressed by Roman and Carolingian elites were different in each period. Expressions of distaste for these workshops and stigma applied to those who worked within them not only reveals how and why these workshops were cast as disreputable, but they also provide a window into the economic and cultural transformations in Western Europe between 300CE-900CE. Ultimately, this paper defends the utility of disreputable labor, or Dirty Work, as a heuristic for analyzing the long-term changes basic to the periods of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.