ABSTRACT
All the Italian city statutes contained provisions governing women's legal capacity to act, and almost all the statutes imposed restrictions, contrary, incidentally, to the provisions of the Justinian corpus of Roman law. The basic areas of civil law in which the sources, which is to say the regulatory documents and, the written opinions of jurists, confront the juridical status of women who work, and of their income, and have to deal with their 'exceptional' character in relation to their less troubling sisters. Lanfranco zacchia's survey develops aspects and themes regarding women's occupations rooted in the juridical teachings and cultural worldview of the early modern age, where the homebound mother figure furnishes the antithetical point of comparison. An exception system, which defined itself as such–if the prerogative of only a few women–offered at least a theoretical horizon of opportunity for any enterprising female negotiating the fluid dynamics of women's work in the early modern period.
