Women’s craft practices in Roman Gaul

The objective of the paper is to present, with three main case studies, the artisanal fields in which women worked, and the different roles they played in these fields, in Roman Gaul from the 1st to the 3rd century.

The literature on craftsmanship in Roman Gaul is very rich. Researchers have at their disposal remains of workshops, tools and finished products to study the types of crafts practiced, the techniques developed and the geographical diffusion of products and techniques (Ferdière, Chardron-Picault, Cochet). To study the men behind the tools, researchers turn to other types of sources: representations and inscriptions. These studies are also rich, they are interested in the status of artisans, their identities and their place in society (Beal, Tran, Caruel 2016). However, there is little mention of women's participation in craft activities in this bibliography. Thanks to the development of studies on women and gender applied to the sciences of antiquity (Boehringer and Sebillotte Cuchet), this tends to improve. From the years 2000-2010, publications devoted part of their development to the question of women and crafts (Mano, Caruel 2019). Better understanding their place in the artisanal world is essential to have a better knowledge of both Roman craftsmanship but also Roman society more broadly.

To identify and characterize women’s craft practices in Roman Gaul, I propose to study three cases: a funerary portrait, a funerary inscription and a stamp on lead pipe. Hilaricla is a deceased woman whose funerary stele was found in Autun (France). She is shown holding a distaff. Considering the tradition of occupation stelae which developed from the 1st to the 3rd in Roman Gaul (Reddé), and the tradition for craftsmen to represent their activity with a tool (Béal, Caruel), we can ask ourselves if Hilaricla was a professional spinner. We will demonstrate how the iconographic analysis must be supplemented by comparisons to other stelae and archaeological context data to face the difficulty of interpreting textile activities which can be symbolic. Cervia Fusca is a hairdresser (tonsor) whose name and profession are mentioned on the funerary stele of her son Marcus Coelius Onesimus, found in Narbonne (France). We will study this inscription in detail and compare it to the few other names of artisanal occupation known for women in Roman Gaul. We will turn to a final type of source to highlight another role that women may have had in the artisanal field in Roman Gaul: workshop leader. Staia Saturnina for example is a woman's name which was found as lead pipes stamps in Vienne (France). Since stamps are generally the mark of the owners of a manufacturing workshop, Staia Saturnina was certainly the owner. Finally, we will briefly mention the particular category of the “wives of”, to ask ourselves: could the blacksmith’s wife have been a blacksmith too? Indeed, the women who are represented or named alongside their craftsmen husbands are reminiscent of women farmers whose role was made invisible during the 20th century.