Before feminism had a name: accounting records, work and women’s agency in Renaissance Italy

This study re-examines the relationship between gender, work and emancipation by questioning the assumption that feminist agency emerges only within modern ideological movements and institutional reforms. It aims to investigate how women’s economic participation in pre-modern contexts may constitute early forms of gendered autonomy. This paper adopts an interpretive historical case study grounded in the new accounting history tradition. Drawing on archival payroll and accounting records documenting Isabella Morra’s employment as a lady-in-waiting, the analysis combines documentary examination with hermeneutic interpretation. Accounting records are treated as historically situated social texts that reveal how labor, recognition and authority were organized within institutional settings. The analysis shows that Morra’s remunerated service temporarily shifted her status from familial dependency to institutional recognition within a Renaissance court. Payroll records document her transformation into a salaried member of the household administration, indicating a form of economic autonomy that disrupted established family arrangements governing women’s roles and mobility. This fragile repositioning proved unstable: her subsequent murder, traditionally interpreted as an “honor killing,” can be reconsidered as a violent reaction to the destabilizing implications of women’s economic independence. This paper makes three contributions. First, it advances a temporally expanded understanding of feminist agency by showing how practices of economic autonomy may precede the formal articulation of feminist ideology. Second, it contributes to management and organizational history by interpreting Renaissance courtly service as an early organizational system structured by roles, remuneration and administrative governance. Third, it extends accounting history by demonstrating how payroll records functioned as social technologies that rendered women’s labor visible within institutional arrangements of recognition and authority.