Kittell, Ellen E. <br/><br/>
"Half as Much as a Man" ? Gender Ideology and Practice in Medieval Flanders 
Ellen E. Kittell 
 -  2011  2011 
 -  [M2LTP_COVER] 
<br/><br/> In his account of 18 September 1379, the bailiff of the Vier Ambachten, a rural circumscription in Flanders, noted that a woman was to be fined "only half as much as a man." This assertion "of half value," however, was the first of its kind. An examination of early fourteenth-century Flemish accounts indicates that the "half-value" principle never found expression in practice. Over the course of the fourteenth century, changes took place in both social and economic practices that correlated with a growing constriction of female economic and social agency. The present argument is in line with other scholarship that makes claims for such a constriction within the late-medieval and early-modern period.