Team

Dr des. Verena Weller has been a member of staff at the Chair of Medieval History since 2020. In April 2024, she successfully completed her doctoral project, which was funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. In 2021, she was also a research assistant in the DFG project ‘Kleinkredit und Markt­teilhabe.’ From 2013 to 2019, she studied History and Romance Studies at the Universities of Mannheim, Paris-Sorbonne IV and Umeå.

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.