Making a Living, Making a Difference | Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

Maria Eagren

ISBN 10: 0190240628 / ISBN 13: 9780190240622

Published by OUP US, 2016

About this Item

Making a Living, Making a Difference | Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society | Maria Eagren | Taschenbuch | Kartoniert / Broschiert | Englisch | 2016 | OUP US | EAN 9780190240622 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.

Seller Inventory # 124125615

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Making a Living, Making a Difference | Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society
• Publisher: OUP US
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190240628
• ISBN 13: 9780190240622
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 234W x 156H x 17D millimeters 234 millimeters width by 156 millimeters height by 17 millimeters depth
• Weight: 471 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Bücher

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.