Abstract
Over the last few decades most guild studies in medieval history have successfully shifted towards a growing attention for the ‘extra-economic’ aspects of guilds, pointing at the social, political and cultural experiences of craft guilds in establishing social networks, defending members’ interests and defining civic culture. Gervase Rosser, in particular, has thoroughly grasped these expressions of the collective consciousness of medieval craft guilds in international literature, identifying them as part of a ‘guild brotherhood’. Discussions on the construction of ‘identity’, ‘solidarity’, ‘trust’ or ‘civil society’ among artisans are, however, hardly ever grounded in the material conditions for industrial production and the concrete power relations of late medieval urban society. In this article I wish to add to this debate a stronger emphasis on the functionality of social ties among craftsmen within the organization of manufacture and the guild’s political economy by investigating the social networks among a population of master weavers in fourteenth-century Ghent. As it appears, the social resources of these weavers – their ‘guild capital’ – were not equally distributed in a brotherhood kind of way. Rather, it was especially in entrepreneurship that ‘guild capital’ could be made, as drapers amplified their actual inclusion within the social fabric of guild and city by establishing intergenerational social mobility, political factions, and class endogamy. This was particularly so within the large-scale and socially polarized textile sector of a European industrial centre like the Flemish city of Ghent.
Highlights
This article is intended to add to the debate on guild networks a stronger emphasis on the functionality of social ties among craftsmen within the organization of manufacture and the guild’s political economy by investigating the social relations within a population of master weavers in fourteenth-century Ghent
Over the last few decades most guild studies in medieval history have successfully shifted towards a growing attention to the ‘extra-economic’ aspects of guilds, pointing at the social, political and cultural experiences of craft guilds in establishing social networks, defending members’ interests, and defining artisanal culture
About the author: tures and networks within the weavers’ craft guild in fourteenth-century research group at the thesis on household energy consumption and the material culture of energy in eighteenth-century Ghent and Leiden
Summary
He added that since the thirteenth century this had been of concern especially to the craftsmen-entrepreneurs who had succeeded to the merchant’s role of quality control and human resources management In this respect, Simona Cerutti has approached the craft guilds in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Turin from a much more instrumental perspective, viewing corporate associations as a way for individual artisans and their family networks to gain access to and get control over economic resources. Endogamy, and political factions wealthier master weavers and drapers established close and long-lasting relations that exceeded mere social and economic reciprocity.
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