Reviewed by: The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience by Sharon Farmer Hilary Maddocks Farmer, Sharon, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 368; 28 illustrations; R.R.P. US $69.95, £60.00; ISBN 9780812248487. In this impressive book, Sharon Farmer demonstrates that a luxury silk industry existed in Paris for around a century, from the 1290s to at least 1397. Medieval Paris was the consumer capital of Europe, renowned for production of quality items including illuminated manuscripts, gold work, tapestries, chests and armour, linen and woollen cloth. This study establishes that the city was also a centre for luxury silk textiles. Although the Paris silk industry never seriously competed with the epicentre of production in northern Italy, Farmer shows that Paris silk was highly prized and distinctive enough to be listed in household accounts and inventories of several European courts. It also provided many Parisians, particularly women, with various levels of employment. Previous research into the Parisian silk industry has been inhibited by the paucity and opacity of documentary evidence as well as lack of material evidence. However, Farmer has extracted much revealing information from the main primary sources including the Paris guild statutes of c. 1266–1365 and the seven extant Paris tax assessments from 1292 to 1313. Her study has been greatly assisted by a database of the tax documents compiled by the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT), which has provided the basis for the tables in the book's extensive appendices. Even though seventy-five per cent of the population [End Page 168] was not wealthy enough to be taxed, and hence does not appear in the assessments, Farmer's prosopographical analysis allows her to make insightful observations about patterns of migration, relative sizes of professional groups, and relative incomes across professions and gender. One of Farmer's themes is migration, and she paints medieval Paris as a city of immigrants attracted to the court, the university, and the specialized luxury industries. Taking a swipe at the modern sentimentalized view that the soul of France lies in a native peasantry descended from Gauls, Romans, and Franks, she finds that immigrants arrived from all over Europe, including the Mediterranean basin. Participants in the silk industry included representatives ('Lombards') from large Italian merchant companies as well as workers from Cyprus, the Levant, and former parts of the Byzantine Empire, some of whom may have been sponsored to the city for their technological and artistic expertise. The best raw silk came from the Caspian Sea region (modern Iran) and the main suppliers were the Italian international merchant companies. No extant sources describe the techniques and organization of the silk crafts in Paris, but Farmer does a remarkable job of extrapolating from available sources. It seems that Parisian weavers created a range of silk items, including narrow wear, diaphanous veils, cendals, taffeta, cloth of gold with metallic thread, and velvet. She suggests that unlike in Lucca and Florence, where mercers owned the fibre through every stage of production, in Paris the mercers sold the thrown silk to dyers and weavers, and then purchased back the completed items, thus minimizing any financial risk. The Parisian silk industry's intersection with gender is another of the book's main themes. Overall, the industry was dominated by women, who comprised as much as eighty per cent of the workers. Perhaps not surprisingly, Farmer finds that the less skilled, lower paid occupations of winding and throwing, requiring inexpensive equipment, were performed mainly by women. Higher status work, such as dyeing and velvet weaving, which required metal vats and expensive, complicated looms as well as demonstrable skill, was the preserve of men. However, compared to other occupations, the Parisian silk industry afforded women extremely high status. Also, encouraged by generous inheritance laws, where widows received half the estate, Parisian silk women sometimes rose to the highest levels: Farmer gives the example of mercer Martine la Thierry, who in 1375–78 sold more than 2,000 francs worth of textiles to the Duke of Anjou. Farmer also examines the...