The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm (review)
track of the greater picture. Particularly impressive are the very detailed quantitative data analyses presented in tables and graphs and the general written discourse elucidating the author’s many striking findings of which, unfortunately, only a few can be cited here. Based on this painstakingly detailed approach, Ogilvie documents for example that “even working with plough and draught animals was observed as often for females as for males” (119) leading to her statement that “daughters and maidservants were surprisingly active in heavy work such as agriculture (and even labouring) for which their physical endowments were unlikely to have suited them optimally” (139). Since the same pattern unfolded for married women, the author rightfully concludes that “few activities were beyond the strength of a woman if there was sufficient incentive” (152). The physical gender divide was thus less pronounced than has been frequently argued. In the chapters on widows, “The Most Visible Women in Pre-Industrial Economies” (206), and “Independent Unmarried Women” who, the author justifiably contends “are widely ignored in studies” (269), the core of the female-male wage gap is also not reducible to “physical strength alone” (289). Instead, “the most striking sexual division of labor was that within industry, with men dominating guilded activities” (330). Hence, Ogilvie convincingly argues, it was the guilds’ and the communities’ gender divide which posed the greatest obstacles to women’s fair access to economic parity. Needless to say, many detrimental repercussions emanated from the various socioeconomic divides. That “wives are often recorded as working while their husbands idled” (185) is among the least evocative, whereas “a husband’s institutional powers within the basic social networks of Württemberg society enabled him to get away with considerable violence against his wife” is considerably more distressing (193). While, however, such descriptions of emotional or “psychic costs” are kept to a bare minimum, this study, nevertheless, conveys the “bitter living” of most women at the time in a wide contextual framework (14). It is an impressive work with impressive findings and convincing arguments. It should not only be read by students of gender and/or economic history, but by all who care about social inequities. MARIA R. BOES West Chester University