ABSTRACT
This chapter starts the brief discussion by contextualising the events and by briefly presenting the Venetian credit market. It deals with the relationships between women, their possession of objects and their credit activity, favouring the perspective of those who actively operated in this area. The chapter highlights the interactions between different credit circuits and analyse some mechanisms related to the phenomenon of over-indebtedness. It presents some reflections and a brief overview of possibilities for future research. The chapter analyses the involvement of women in the supply and demand of formal and informal consumer credit in eighteenth-century Venice. Many of the protagonists of the eighteenth-century trials concerning issues related to hire contracts were, not by chance, women. Men had different social and economic recognition compared to women and achieved it through the public social rituals related to their trades and shops, or from other key rituals such as their shared drinking at the inns.
