ABSTRACT
Legal historians have pointed to the predominance of an 'egalitarian trend' in the customs of the Low Countries, as several customary rules implied equal rights for men and women. Legal historians have pointed towards several egalitarian provisions in the customary laws of the Low Countries, which could have given women more economic opportunities than their counterparts in other regions of Europe. Both in the Low Countries and in other regions of Europe, the economic activities of late medieval women have chiefly been considered from the perspective of female labour. To examine women's participation on capital markets in Leuven, this study makes use of the annual registers of the aldermen. The relative distribution of the amounts borrowed by men, women and married couples provides further insight into women's position as borrowers. Women would have tended to use different financial instruments to men, focusing on the most risk-adverse types of credit such as hereditary annuities or life annuities sold by public bodies.
