Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds.
Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate and ultimately to redefine property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the...

Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens-wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds.

Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate-and ultimately to redefine-property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the...

In Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300 1600, Martha C. Howell challenges dominant interpretations of the relationship between the so-called commercial revolution of late medieval Europe and the capitalist age that followed. Howell argues that the merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and consumers in cities and courts throughout Western Europe, even in the densely urbanized Low Countries that are the main focus of this study, were by no means proto-capitalist and did not consider their property a fungible asset. Even though they freely bought and sold property using sophisticated financial...