Team

Dr. Verena Weller has been a Research Associate at the Chair of Medieval History since 2020 and in 2021 was involved, among other things, in the DFG-Project “Small Credit and Market Participation.” Since February 2025, she has also been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC-Project “PatriFem. Charting Female Property and Patrimonial Rights in Law and Practice Across Western Europe (12th-16th Centuries)” (led by Prof. Dr. Denise Bezzina), based at the University of Genoa, Italy. Her research focuses particularly on cities in present-day southern France, such as Marseille, as well as on German-speaking areas, such as Speyer and Vienna. During the winter semester of 2025, she is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna.

She successfully completed her doctorate, funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, in April 2024. She studied History and Romance Studies from 2013 to 2019 at the Universities of Mannheim, Paris-Sorbonne IV and Umeå.

From the mid-12th century onwards, laws in Europe increasingly restricted women's economic capacity, severely impacting their financial independence. This trend continued into the early modern period. The causes remain unclear. The ERC-funded PatriFem project is investigating France, the German-speaking world, and Italy, analyzing legal, socioeconomic, and political factors. Extensive archival sources are also being evaluated to better understand the origins and regional differences of these laws. Further information about the project can be found here: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101126116.

As part of the project “Packaging before Plastics. Inspirations from History” funded by InnoMa, students will learn skills such as audiovisual communication and video editing related to the topic of “Pre-Modern Packaging”. The basic content will be acquired through short videos created in advance. The outcome of the course is a website on the topic of pre-modern packaging, on which the content will be presented in various formats (short videos, social media posts, written papers).

Funded by the University of Mannheim and originally selected for funding as part of the Research Seed Capital (RiSC) programme of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (MWK) (total: 40,270 euros).

The research project analyses household inventories from Montpellier, Marseille, Perpignan and Bologna from the 13th to 15th centuries. These are property inventories that were recorded in writing by the surviving dependants at a notary's office after death. Surprisingly often this was done on the initiative of the wife. This type of source therefore offers insights into the strategies of economic security for the period of widowhood that have rarely been illuminated to date. Moreover, the inventories often allow an unusually precise determination of women's assets.

Women have always been represented in all fields. Only in the field of economic history did it seem for a long time that women were underrepresented. The notarial registers from the 13th and 14th centuries of various economically important metropolises in southern France show that women moved independently in the economy.

This doctoral project is concerned with the study of women's participation as lenders, debtors, and decision-makers in economic affairs in the late 13th and early 14th centuries in Montpellier, one of the most important economic centers of medieval southern France. Although legal regulations in the late Middle Ages allowed women only limited opportunities to act, initial research of notarial registers revealed that women played a large part in medieval credit transactions there. In the practice of medieval business, the names of women as contracting parties, as buyers, and as heirs appear regularly in the sources. 

The aim is to develop a meaningful micro-study of the economic activities of women of different social provenance in a large medieval city. In the specially created database FEM (Les femmes dans l ́économie de Montpellier médiévale), data on women in the credit economy of Montpellier (date, name, marital status, social status, total contract transactions amount of money) will be collected. Based on this compilation, the findings can be evaluated systematically and also quantitatively.