Making a Living, Making a Difference

What do people do all day? What did women and men do to make a living in early modern Europe, and what did their work mean? As this book shows, the meanings depended both on the worker and on the context.
With an innovative analytic method that is yoked to a specially-built database of source materials, this book revises many received opinions about the history of gender and work in Europe. The applied verb-oriented method finds the 'work verbs' that appear incidentally in a wide variety of early modern sources and then analyzes the context in which they appear. By tying information technologies and computer-assisted analysis to the analytic powers--both quantitative and qualitative--of professional historians, the method gets much closer to a participatory observation of the micro-patterns of early modern life than was once believed possible. This book directly addresses a number of broad problems often debated by historians of gender and early modern Europe. First, it discusses the problem of assessing more accurately the incidence, character and division of work. Second, it analyzes the configurations of work and human difference. Third, it deals with the extent to which work practices created notions of difference--gender difference but also other forms of difference--and, conversely, to what extent work practices contributed to notions of sameness and gender convergence. Finally, it studies the impact of processes of change. Drawing on sources from Sweden, the authors show the importance of multiple employment, the openness of early modern households, the significance of marriage and marital status, the gendered nature of specific tasks, and the ways in which state formation and commercialization were entangled in people's everyday lives.

Maria Ågren is Professor of History at Uppsala University and author of Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857, among other titles. She is involved in various aspects of the digital humanities.

AcknowledgmentsContributorsIntroduction: Making a Living, Making a Difference- Maria ÅgrenChapter 1: The Diversity of Work- Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Göran RydénChapter 2: Working Together- Dag Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, Jonas Lindström, Jan Mispelaere, and Göran RydénChapter 3: Marriage and Work: Intertwined Sources of Agency and Authority- Sofia Ling, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Christopher Pihl, and Maria ÅgrenChapter 4: Less than Ideal? Making a Living Before and Outside Marriage- Hanna Östholm and Cristina PrytzChapter 5: Constitutive Tasks: Performances of Hierarchy and Identity- Karin Hassan Jansson, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Ann-Catrin ÖstmanChapter 6: The Dark Side of the Ubiquity of Work: Vulnerability and Destitution among the Elderly- Erik Lindberg, Benny Jacobsson, and Sofia LingChapter 7: Gender, Work, and the Fiscal-Military State- Marie Lennersand, Jan Mispelaere, Christopher Pihl, and Maria ÅgrenChapter 8: Conclusion- Maria ÅgrenAppendixBibliographyIndex