Speakers: Laura Gowing, Jeff Horn, Jonathan Barry, Jose Nieto Sánchez, Ida Juul, Leonard Rosenband, Lars Edgren, Sietske Van den Wyngaert and Merja Uotila.
Apprentices depended on masters to train and support them; and masters depended on their apprentices to work diligently to keep their workshops in business. Often living in close proximity for many years, the relationship that a master and apprentice built between them was an essential element in the success of an apprenticeship. Yet how was this relationship made to work? And when and why did it break down? This workshop brings together economic and social historians to explore the nature and characteristics of the master-apprentice relationship as it existed across Europe between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
Speakers will examine the potential of both economic and socio-cultural approaches to explain the master-apprentice relationship. Key questions include: Can we observe shifts in the balance between paternalism and patriarchy on the one hand, and contractual, commercial imperatives on the other, in the ways in which masters and apprentices lived and worked together? Why did so many apprenticeships end early? To what extent did apprentices live under the roof of their master and what was the impact of this on their training and the master-apprentice-relationship? How can we understand the trade-off between learning and working? Should long term transformations in their engagement in household chores or their wages be understood from an economic or a socio-cultural perspective? What was the impact of proletarianisation in reshaping the master-apprentice relationship? Were apprentices transformed into cheap work force as the early modern period progressed, and what did this mean for socialization and training?
To attend, email Sietske.VandenWyngaert@uantwerpen.be