Medieval Documents When Considering Historical

¶ … Medieval Documents

When considering historical documents, one must be careful not only to examine the ostensible, surface-level information recorded in those documents, but also the abundance of information that is revealed regarding the context of the document's writing, the author's intentions in writing it, and the makeup of the original intended audience. Doing so allows one to access the wealth of information contained in any given document, because even if the specific recorded information is faulty or biased, acknowledging and considering those biases often reveals useful information about the historical context. Thus, when considering a set of statutes for a wool guild written in Padua some time around 1384, it is necessary not only to consider how the statutes represent the rules designed to maintain the interests of the guild, but also the ways in which the statutes represent the biases and assumptions of the original author and his or her (but most likely his) intended audience.

That the statues of the wool guild under discussion here serve to protect the financial and political interests of the wool guild should come as no surprise, but one may remark at how fully the guild asserts its dominance over the wool trade in the whole of Padua and the surrounding area, demonstrating how powerful trade guilds had become at the time and underlining the fact that "cloth functioned as money" in medieval Europe, and especially Italy (Caferro, 2008, p. 194). The statutes were likely written by one of the guild stewards at the time, with the intention that the statutes would be read and followed not only by the members of the guild but by anyone who was planning on buying, selling, or using wool in Padua or the surrounding countryside.

Though the reception of this particular set of guild statutes is difficult to ascertain, in general one may presume that the publication of the guild statutes likely pleased the guild itself and its patron, Lord Francesco da Carrara, but that the somewhat onerous restrictions placed on the buying and selling of wool likely did not please those outside the guild or otherwise in a position of reduced power due to their class, ethnicity, or gender, because the guild, much like contemporary monopolies, served to reinforce the dominant power structure while monetarily benefitting a few at the expense of the majority ("Statutes of a wool guild," 1384, 15).

While it is somewhat difficult to locate the rampant racism and xenophobia present in all of human history, and especially those places in which power is concentrated in the hands of a few, examining these statutes do reveal how the rules of the guild and the economic system they ultimately reinforced worked to maintain a gender disparity that favored men far above women. Firstly, the rule that no one who does not know how to read or write may not be a steward or assessor of the guild implicitly bars the majority of women from positions of any real power in the guild due to the unlikelihood of women receiving the same quality of education as men, even in the upper classes ("Statutes of a wool guild," 1384, 7). Thus, like the literacy tests used by Southern states to prohibit blacks from voting in United States elections, this statute gives the guild a means of indirectly prohibiting women from holding power while leaving open the option for each group of stewards to include their own illiterate person, with the reader able to guess how frequently this single spot was actually reserved for a woman.

The second statute which serves to maintain the economic and political domination of women is the rule stating that women may not "dare or presume to take for spinning more than one ball of wool at one time," because this prevents any attempt on the part of female workers to stockpile or otherwise accumulate enough wool to sell or use it outside the established, guild-monitored economy ("Statutes of a wool guild," 1384, 106). Although this statute may have decreased the overall efficiency of the wool-spinning process by requiring women to go get a new ball of wool every time they finish, it also served to protect the guild from rebellion or discontent, because allowing women greater control over the process "might give rise to a strong organization of skilled craftsmen who would be much more difficult to control than" individual women, spinning one ball of wool at a time out of their homes (Belfanti, 2004, p. 579).

Thus, the most important effect of guild statutes is twofold, because it blends the economic with the social in such a way that two sets of independent but related standards are reinforced in order to maintain the power of a small group of guild masters. The statutes use gender bias as a way of protecting an unjust economic order, and that order in turn helps to reinforce this gender bias and disparity. Furthermore, coupled with the application of sumptuary laws regarding fashion and the purchasing of fabric, the guild statutes allow the guild to assert control over nearly every visible facet of everyday life. While the central intended audience was of course the guild members, because the statutes apply restrictions to those outside the guild as well, one may interpret them to simultaneously be a demonstration of power by the guild, as a means of showing both the general public and the laborers the true extent of the guild's power.