" Whether man or woman": Gender Inclusivity in the Town Ordinances of Medieval Douai (original) (raw)

2000, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern …

In the mid-thirteenth century, the aldermen of Douai began issuing a series of ordinances for the regulation of the city's social and economic life. 1 They often addressed issues concerning particular groups -citizens, practitioners of a certain trade, those who brewed beer, and so forth. Typically these ordinances paired terms that explicitly specified both genders, such as borgois u borgoise, taneres u taneresse, cervoisiers ne cervoisiere, cils ne celes, or hom ne feme. 2 What makes such dyadic reference unusual is the status with which it invests both members of the dyad. The aldermen's routine use of genderspecific dyadic formulas reveals that the social and economic participation of women in Douai was perceived not as exceptional or "marked," but rather as the norm, virtually on par with that of males. And while dyadic usage in no way implies the existence of a golden age for women in this city, 3 its prevalence suggests nothing less radical than the claim that the city did not reckon its population in terms of patriarchally headed households, but rather in terms of workers. The constant reiteration of both genders renders implausible any assumption that one (the female) is conventionally subsumed into a household publicly represented by the other (the male). The prevalence of dyadic usage in the thirteenth century also calls into question, at least for the Douaisian experience, the argument that women's position in medieval society began to deteriorate seriously in the twelfth century with increased urbanization and with the spreading influence of institutions, such as bureaucracies and the universities, which tended to marginalize and exclude women. 4 There is no need to prove that women can be found at virtually all levels of Douaisian or any other society; this has been well documented by others. The present essay instead focuses on gender-inclusive usage in the