Legal trades and black markets : women involved in the sale of food in Lyon in the late 17th and early 18th centuries

International audienceThis chapter seeks to understand the role of women throughout the urban economy by analysing their activities in one specific sector, the food trade, which was an essential, and thus highly regulated, market. It focuses on the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth in order to analyse the impact of ‘colbertism’, that is of corporatization, on women. My method consisted in comparing traditional source materials for the urban economy with specific documentation on practices and repression in the market for food. Three major aspects are examined. The first relates to the role played by women in the regulated market: often not mentioned in source materials or relegated to a minor role by the guilds, women were nevertheless omnipresent in the retail food trade, whether within the guilds’ bailiwick or outside the official marketplace (in particular, selling or hawking). A second section reviews the lives and activities of women involved in three types of illegal activities: hoarders, sellers of meat during Lent, and thieves. Detailed descriptions of their activities offer useful insights for understanding the dynamics of the black market. Finally, because of their legal status, women were often de facto actors in the food trade by playing the role of intermediary between the official market and a parallel market where certain illicit forms of trade were more or less tolerated