Why did women dominate the coffin making trade in 13th century Paris?

by Hergrim

I was trying to see if I could find any full length English translation of the 1292 Tax Role of Paris, and came across this article on the version list that was edited by Hercule Géraud. While only containing the professions that related to their byname, there are a few curiosities with regard to female roles.

Some of these women would have been widows who inherited their husband's business and kept it going with journeymen and apprentices, others were independently run. A few jobs are almost entirely female oriented, and the nature of the job (chambermaid, laundry worker, etc) explains this.

However, one job in particular - coffin maker - is almost entirely dominated by women according to the list. 22 coffin makers are women, while only 4 are men. No form of employment that requires the same skillset has anywhere near that number of women involved.

Is this just selection bias, or was there some reason why women in 13th century Paris were more likely to be coffin makers than men?

The tax rolls from Philip the Fair's reign certainly include "la coffiniere" and spelling variants. But I'm afraid your source has a bit of a translation error or obfuscation going on. Coffin (couffin, cofin, kofyn, &c) in Old French isn't our English coffin-casket for the dead. It's more like a small box with a lid, a basket, or--by analogy--a type of crusted pastry/pie. (Screenshot from the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, which collates medieval French dictionaries on both sides of the Channel). When you look at other box/basket making professions, men dominate or even are exclusive. Using the tables from Janice Archer's work on the 1292-1300 tax rolls and the Livre des Metiers from 1268, for example, there are 11 ecriniers (makers of large and small boxes) and 0 ecrinieres; there are 41 coffriers (makers of heavy duty boxes) and 11 coffrieres. If we go with coffin as basket, which seems less likely, it looks like all the variants are male.

The other interesting possibility is the metaphorical use of "couffin" for a specific type of baked good. This is intriguing because we know the various bakers' crafts in the Middle Ages were among the most organized and intricate. They did extend down to specializing in particular types of baked goods, even to the use of specific kinds of flour for bread. And yes, some of these tasks were more closely associated with women's roles than others. On the other hand, the massive pile of regulations related to baking in the Livre des Metiers don't specify cofinier(e) as a delegated branch.

So without a clear idea of whether coffiniere is talking about some kind of portable box or a portable pastry (Archer places them in the "ambiguous" category), it's a little harder to contextualize women's dominance of the trade within Parisian society. If it refers to box-making, one possibility might be that widows, especially older widows, moved into making small boxes as opposed to large ones as they got older and/or had less power to compete with men. I don't know if this is already true in 1300 Paris, but around this time in Germany, we start to see women limited to, well, "sustenance crafts"--that is, small supplements to a family income to make sure everyone can eat, or just enough to support a widow maybe with some inheritance from her deceased spouse. Now, I'm extrapolating here from "small boxes" to "small-time work," which is absolutely a leap, but it definitely reminds me of things like women taking up "lower levels" of candle-making (devotional/memorial candles for churches, rather than the major candles used for lighting and such).

Women are represented more than men among the fouassier(e)s, which is a pastry-maker, so if couffin is the metaphorical baking use, that could very well extrapolate over.