Women and credit in eighteenth-century Venice: a preliminary analysis

This article focuses on the Venetian credit market in the Eighteenth century and it analyses the roles that women played in it. What emerges, indeed, is a predominant female presence in entire sectors of the market. The desire of some to make money through a series of unused items met the need of others to find material securities on which a loan could be based: namely, demand met supply and the hiring was linked to the credit. In fact there was a huge request of objects and mon-ey within the Venetian society in the eighteenth century. Women could participate in a dense net-work of exchanges thanks to the economic weight of their dowries. As this article shows, they had credit within society, they could enter into networks of interpersonal acquaintances and act as liai-sons or guarantors. Generally speaking, the resulting picture is that of a city that seems to rest on an intense but fragile network of credit deals.