ABSTRACT
Though there is now a fairly extensive scholarship on the lives of medieval women and particular attention has been paid to women’s work, this has conventionally been understood in rather narrow terms. This present chapter seeks to move beyond an exploration of paid employment or the public economy. It seeks rather to offer a holistic analysis of the activities of the medieval bourgeois housewife. Here a whole range of activities necessary for the effective functioning of the home as both an emotional and an economic entity are seen as integral to the role of the bourgeois wife. She was simultaneously wife, sexual partner, mother, domestic manager, and economic partner. She it was who directed the female servants, supervised in her husband’s absence, ensured meals were cooked, floors cleaned, utensils washed, children comforted and clothed, guest catered for, and husbands kept emotionally and sexually satisfied. The very success of the household and the family trade depended or her working in partnership with her husband, but while he may have been the public face of the family business, it is she who made the family home.
