This volume is one of the first examples of a big data project in the humanities, and as such it makes both a methodological and a historiographical contribution. Editor Maria Ågren is the team leader of the Gender and Work Project at Uppsala University, and the book was collectively written with the help of fourteen other project participants. Tabulations of the project’s data are readily available, but the researchers do a nice job of using specific examples and cases to illustrate their larger points. The researchers began with a large question: how did people in early modern Sweden use their time to make a living? The answers the researchers found provide compelling glimpses into how work differed by gender, social, and marital status, as well as how work connected to marriage, family, and the state.
Using court records, accounts, petitions, and diaries, the Gender and Work project gathered more than...
