HansaWomen

Women among the Hansa in Bergen is a pioneering study investigating the role of women in the lives and trade of members of the Hanseatic community in Bergen from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century. The project aims to achieve a comprehensive and more nuanced understanding of women’s roles in relation to Hanseatic merchants. The project will do this in two ways: 1) It challenges the traditional male narrative of Hanseatic history, which portrays women only as sexual partners (concubines or prostitutes) of the merchants, and demonstrates that the reality was more complex. 2) It develops a new chronological understanding of the evolution of the status of members of the Hanseatic community in Bergen from medieval foreigners, who were not permitted to marry, to men, who in the eighteenth century integrated into the local community through marriage. The project will integrate the, until now, much-overlooked women into the grand narrative of Hanseatic history and thereby has the potential to serve as an international paradigm-changer in this otherwise male-dominated research field. 

The project is a collaborative effort between university researchers and museum professionals. The project is hosted and conducted at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen, but it also involves expert scholars from the universities of Amsterdam, Bodø and Tromsø. In addition to producing novel historical knowledge and disseminating it through scholarly workshops and publications, the project will present its novel research findings to a broader audience through an exhibition created in collaboration with experts from the partner museums: Hanseatic Museum in Bergen, the Jektefartsmuseet in Bodø and the Europäisches Hansemuseum in Lübeck. The exhibition is mobile and will first be displayed at the Hanseatic Museum in Bergen, followed by Bodø and Lübeck.