The Measure of Woman. Marie A. Kelleher

the ajuar in Aragon, axuar in Catalonia, and exovar in Valencia, dowry in the Crown of Aragon (as in the rest of medieval Europe) consisted of the property that a woman’s family of origin bestowed on her at the time of her marriage.⁵ Legally, dowry could consist of either moveable or immovable goods, though in practice cash dowries dominated during this period. In a survey of fifteen dotal instruments preserved in the municipal archive of Girona during the reign of Jaume II, dowries ranged from 200 sous (for a marriage between a baker’s daughter and a shoemaker)⁶ to 3,000 sous plus a significant trousseau (for a marriage between two families of the local minor aristocracy).⁷ Discounting these two as outliers, far from the mean, the average dowry of the remaining thirteen couples was 680.8 sous, with the amount remaining relatively stable over the course of nearly four decades.⁸ This amount does not include the unspecified values of the trousseaus included in most of these contracts—these typically included one or two dresses (one contract specified that the woman’s trousseau included two dresses, made of materials valued at 20 and 15 sous respectively⁹), bedding, and often a chest “with its contents”—presumably some or all of the woman’s personal or household goods.¹⁰ While the Girona sample is small, its figures roughly align with those found in other territories in the Crown of Aragon around the same time: dowries in the lower Llobregat region just southwest of Barcelona averaged 48.2 lliures (964 sous) for the period between 1321 and 1330, and 43.6 lliures (872 sous) for the fourteenth century as a whole.¹¹ Half a century earlier, dowries of artisan women in the town of Perpignan averaged 500 sous.¹² Even over a century later, during the much-studied period of dowry inflation,¹³ figures in the region were not much higher: in fifteenth-century Valencia, artisan dowries clustered around 800–1,200 sous, while the dowries of women from laboring families were predominantly valued at between 400 and 800 sous.¹⁴

      Less common, but important to consider nonetheless, were commonproperty marriages. Variously known as germania, farascha, or matrimonio mig per mig, these were marriages in which all marital assets were shared equally, and neither party had responsibility for the other’s debts. At the death of one spouse, the surviving partner would be left with their half of the marital property but with no claim on any of their deceased spouse’s share.¹⁵ The Code of Tortosa makes provisions for such unions,¹⁶ as do the thirteenth-century Costums of the Vall d’Aran, which stipulate community of both marital goods and capital gains, especially in cases of settling debts incurred by one partner.¹⁷ Valencian law also allowed for common-property marriage and provided for the merging of both property brought into the marriage at its inception and capital gains acquired during the course of the marriage.¹⁸ Historians have generally linked this type of marriage with couples of lower socioeconomic standing, an arrangement born of necessity rather than choice, either because a woman’s family was unable to afford a dowry, or because work among these classes was a collaborative endeavor, resulting in joint profits or losses that did not accord well with the separate property regime of a dotal marriage.¹⁹ But in her study of late thirteenth-century Perpignan, Rebecca Winer has argued convincingly against this set of assumptions, showing that women and men in mig per mig marriages came from a variety of economic levels. The one common characteristic was that the participants in this type of arrangement tended to be artisans, tradespeople, or sometimes “professionals” like physicians²⁰—people whose wealth, in other words, came from their labor, rather than from landed income.