The Past was Female: Women's Work and the Economy of Viking Towns

Dr. Mary Valante is back! This time she leads us in a discussion on women in the Viking Age.

Vikings are usually stereotyped as fearsome warriors who raided western Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries – the last of the great (apparently shirtless?) barbarian invasions according to traditional histories. But the reality was that the Scandinavians of the time were more often traders and craftsmen and town builders, who expanded and inhabited trade routes from Byzantium to North America. The inhabitants of those new trade centers needed food. They needed ale, they needed to prepare against the possibility of famine or sieges. They needed large-scale textile production to create fabrics to use, wear, and trade. Shifting from domestic scale production to an urban economy built on these necessities fell largely to the Viking Age women, without whom there could have been no towns, no sailing for ships, and no Viking Age.

Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/96991502599?pwd=dWlPaEU5dmdPYmtmLzIrV3JpSUV3UT0