The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris

Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience

Sharon Farmer

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780812248487
• eBook ISBN: 9780812293319
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

For more than one hundred years, from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris was the only western European town north of the Mediterranean basin to produce luxury silk cloth. What was the nature of the Parisian silk industry? How did it get there? And what do the answers to these questions tell us?According to Sharon Farmer, the key to the manufacture of silk lies not just with the availability and importation of raw materials but with the importation of labor as well. Farmer demonstrates the essential role that skilled Mediterranean immigrants played in the formation of Paris's population and in its emergence as a major center of luxury production. She highlights the unique opportunities that silk production offered to women and the rise of women entrepreneurs in Paris to the very pinnacles of their profession. The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris illuminates aspects of intercultural and interreligious interactions that took place in silk workshops and in the homes and businesses of Jewish and Italian pawnbrokers.Drawing on the evidence of tax assessments, aristocratic account books, and guild statutes, Farmer explores the economic and technological contributions that Mediterranean immigrants made to Parisian society, adding new perspectives to our understanding of medieval French history, luxury trade, and gendered work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on Nomenclature and Money
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Paris, City of Immigrants
• Chapter 2. From Persian Cocoon to Soie de Paris: Trade Networks and Silk Techniques
• Chapter 3. Immigrant Mercers and Silk Workers
• Chapter 4. Gender, Work, and the Parisian Silk Industry
• Chapter 5. Jews, Foreign Lombards, and Parisian Silk Women
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1. Mediterranean Immigrants Paying Taxes as “Bourgeois of Paris” or Included on Parisian Guild Lists
• Appendix 2. Mercers in the Parisian Tax Assessments, Arranged by Neighborhood
• Appendix 3. Silk Weavers in the Parisian Tax Assessments
• Appendix 4. Silk Throwsters in the Parisian Tax Assessments
• Appendix 5. Ouvriers/Ouvriéres de Soie in the Parisian Tax Assessments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments