Session at the European Architectural History Network Sixth International Meeting

Until recently, historians of the built environment have assumed that, before the modern era, women had little or no involvement in the making of architecture and development of cities, other than a role as patron. Women did not participate in municipal government, nor were they traditionally allowed membership in guilds related to the building crafts. Yet, women played an important role in other aspects of the commercial activity and prosperity of the city. Was the business of building always an exception? Only in the last decades have glimpses of the true nature of women’s contribution come to the fore. Cases have been published of medieval and early modern women working in a range of occupations: poor women hired for manual labor on the construction site, women working with their husbands and fathers in the building crafts, widows continuing the workshops of their deceased husbands, and women supplying and transporting building materials. Their numbers have been reportedly few at any given site; yet they were there.

This session invites papers that complicate the accepted interpretations of women’s agency in the city and those that look for new ways to analyze the limited archival evidence. There is abundant literature today on aristocratic women as patrons of secular and monastic works; but, were there cases of non-elite women acting as patrons of civic projects through donation, testament, or the purchase of municipal public debt? Aristocratic women had opportunities to influence and guide the design of the projects they patronized; did bourgeois women design or manage architectural projects privately on their own property? What was the nature of middle class womens’ unpaid “support” in their family’s craft or trade? And in studying this, are we highlighting women’s agency or oppression? Looking closer at the evidence itself, in what ways does archival material occlude or omit the presence of women; and what can that tell us? Did documented daily activities of urban women affect the spatial structure and character of an urban center? If we cast a broader, collaborative net across a region, this may provide enough evidence to propose a rationale for women’s labor on, and related to, the construction site. If a wide spatial and temporal understanding presents itself, is it time to re-write the history of (pre-modern) architecture from an alternative, feminist point of view?

Shelley Roff, University of Texas at San Antonio

Contact : Shelley Roff, Email : [email protected]