Female Work Arrangements in the Datini Letters
In the letters preserved in the Datini archive, women could take the epistolary stage when it came to their (pre-)entry into a labour relation with the Datinis or their social network. The negotiating scope of women during these entries is the analytical focus of this paper; to negotiate and/or to...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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StudienVerlag
2023-10-01
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| Series: | Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/oezg/article/view/8341 |
| Summary: | In the letters preserved in the Datini archive, women could take the epistolary stage when it came to their (pre-)entry into a labour relation with the Datinis or their social network. The negotiating scope of women during these entries is the analytical focus of this paper; to negotiate and/or to be negotiated is the central question. Based on 53 letters from the years 1393–1398, four different search and recruitment processes for three different types of female workers – servants, slaves, and wet nurses – are comparatively examined by way of a historical semantic reading. Taking the verb-oriented method as a starting point, this study proposes two methodological extensions: an attribute-oriented method and an adaption of the semantic roles approach from linguistics. The paper argues that this historical semantic trio of methods can help to understand group-related and individual degrees of (non-)control over actions in the arrangement of labour relations in late medieval Tuscany by bringing positions of power to the epistolary surface.
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| ISSN: | 1016-765X 2707-966X |