Gendering the Material Renaissance: Women, Industriousness and the Female Body at the Court of Württemberg

Abstract

Focusing on almost 9,000 receipts issued by the ducal chancery of Friedrich I and Johann Friedrich of Württemberg between 1593 and 1628, this article charts the industriousness and material creativity of female makers and consumers in Protestant Württemberg. It provides a detailed discussion of craftswomen's lives, materials, networks, artefacts and earnings and relates them to the duchesses' strategies of consumption. The article examines women's embodied creative material engagement in an increasingly diversified consumerist world, more specifically the material practices, communities and regimes of female industriousness at the court of Württemberg. By conceptualizing female industriousness in bodily, material and gendered terms and in regard to the overlapping worlds of production and consumption, this article charts women's entrepreneurial role in shaping material lives at this Lutheran court around 1600.