Much of the research that has been done in the last decades on women’s work and on the role of women in early modern economies deals with the urban context, but has all this production been able to rewrite the history of work in early modern European cities? The urban labour markets of early modern Europe combined two opposite and at the same time complementary features as they were regulated and structured by institutions. Yet they were also flexible and open, offering chances and opportunities to immigrant and non-qualified workers as well as the possibility of earning through activities at the limits of, or beyond, legality. The chapter addresses these observations and these questions first, by presenting the existing quantitative data on women’s work activities in different urban contexts and, secondly, by focusing on the problem of guilds and more generally on different aspects of work organization. The aim of the chapter is to present the state of the field but also to propose a vision of urban economies that integrates the gender dimension and maintains an approach that is as Europe-wide as possible.

All European countries had apprenticeship systems, which were normally regulated and implemented locally. This involved three institutional actors: guilds providing a regulatory framework, notaries registering the contracts between individual masters and apprentices, and urban courts overseeing the practical implementation of these rules and arrangements. The guilds’ role has been often overstated, the urban authorities’ impact underestimated. Large percentages of pre-modern teenagers were educated, socially and technically, by this system. Most of them were males, who normally received their training from someone outside their immediate family circle. Apprenticeship was a mechanism for social, geographic and occupational mobility across Europe, but only a minority of apprentices could reasonably expect to become masters themselves. In the absence of a viable alternative, the pre-modern apprenticeship system continued in many countries after the abolition of the guilds, and even into the early twentieth century.