In her book "Mobile Ökonomien", Nicole Stadelmann investigates the everyday economic lives of artisanal families in St. Gallen during the early modern period. Adopting a microhistorical approach, Stadelmann traces the collective biography of six families (including wives, husbands, daughters and sons), thereby capturing the role of family economies in this city as its denizens managed the temporal dynamics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Stadelmann provides a multifaceted portrayal of the tradecraft economy by examining how artisanal households adapted to daily challenges and vicissitudes, ranging from guild structures and emerging consumer markets to debt and migratory networks.
In his review, Dennis Frey Jr. has high praise for the book, highlighting the "thoughtful, innovative structure and meticulous research and analysis". He also appreciates the great lengths to which Stadelmann went to recover the habitus and lived experiences of the artisanal families as fully as possible. He writes that the analysis of gender and its functions within families is particularly insightful. Through her painstaking reconstruction, "Stadelmann transports the reader back to St. Gallen of the 1690s and early 1700s, allowing us to inhabit the spaces these families occupied."
The review can be accessed for free on both infoclio.ch and HSozKult, and Stadelmann's book is available on the Wallstein Verlag website.
Frey, Dennis Jr: Review: Stadelmann, Nicole: Mobile Ökonomien. Das Wirtschaften und Haushalten St. Galler Handwerkerfamilien in der Frühen Neuzeit, Göttingen 2024, in: infoclio.ch, 14.07.2026,<https://www.infoclio.ch/de/rez?rid=142735>.
