Throughout most of the twentieth century, historians of Medieval European Jewish communities overlooked the contributions of Jewish women to their families and to their communities. Recently, historians of northern European and Spanish Jews have begun to utilize notarial records to describe the financial activities of Jewish women in the Middle Ages. Yet few historians have utilized documents of practice to examine the activities of Jews in medieval or Renaissance Italy. Those few who have focus almost exclusively on the larger centers of Rome and Venice, which while important, do not represent the more typical and much smaller Jewish communities scattered throughout northern and central Italy in this period.

This dissertation aims to address this oversight, and thus examines the economic roles played by Jewish women in the central Italian town of Perugia in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. Notarial evidence reveals that by the fifteenth century, Jewish women not only possessed their own property, they managed it, alienated it, and gave it away as personal bequests in their wills. They also acted as heads-of-households in the absence of their husbands, and participated in decisions concerning family property, engaged publically in banking, and interacted with non-Jewish men in regards to business affairs.

In Perugia, this was a new development. Why did it develop when it did? And what did this mean for women's position within their families and their community? By placing my analysis of these notarial records against the political backdrop of late medieval and Renaissance Perugia and within a discussion of normative rabbinic literature, I explore how this practice---female financial autonomy within the family---can be understood as a tool that aided the family's and community's struggle, and developed in response to a increasingly unstable political and social environment in Renaissance Perugia. Thus this study contributes not only to historians' understandings of this small yet important Jewish community, but also to our knowledge of the contributions Jewish women made to these communities, contributions that often far exceeded the expectations---or desires---of late antique and medieval rabbis.