Economies of Death: Wills, Gender and Resilience in Toledo, Spain (1576–1697)

Abstract

Plague, inflation and bankruptcy struck Toledo, Spain, in the seventeenth century. This article uses a sample of eighty wills written in Toledo to analyse how people coped. I argue that resilience in Toledo was gendered and relied heavily on the economic activity and agency of women. Women's ability to manage or provide for family, household and community, their development of affective/economic networks within and beyond the household and their affective/economic cooperation with men helped families cope with the daily problems they faced and build an economy that was elastic, adaptive and able to withstand individual deaths and economic troubles.