This lovely book makes a strong argument for detailed case studies. Using meticulously recreated lineages and business relationships pieced together from notarial records, Kathryn Reyerson offers her readers a close analysis of one woman's careful stewardship of the business empire her young sons inherited at their father's death. Historians of gender will be interested in Reyerson's middle ground between medieval scholars’ glum assessment of the limiting and oppressive force of the omnipresent patriarchy and a more optimistic view of women's ability to act independently as business agents and workers. Scholars interested in economic questions will be intrigued by Reyerson's careful descriptions of the myriad partnership agreements and rental contracts Martha de Cabanis mobilized to advance her sons’ economic interests. Those engaged in the material turn will find Reyerson's eye for the physical world and her gift at recreating that of particular interest.

The most obvious beneficiaries of this erudite work, though, will be advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students who, with this volume, are presented with a model of how to tell the story of one woman and her family in a deeply contextualized manner. Reyerson vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and material culture of Montpellier before the Black Death and provides the texture of Martha de Cabanis's social and economic life, all the while acknowledging the limits of what we can know and what she can recreate from the extant record. This short book, written in straightforward prose, packs in a bounty of information on subjects ranging from domestic architecture to familial affection, from the minutia of the silk trade to the nitty-gritty of real-estate transactions. In Reyerson's hands, laconic notarial are pixels that, when connected, ultimately reveal an image of the complicated economic and social world a young widow navigated as she bolstered and expanded a financial empire on behalf of her three sons.

After a preliminary chapter that lays out the political, geographic, and topographic outlines of Montpellier, each of the subsequent eight chapters takes up an aspect of Martha de Cabanis's story: her natal family, her marriage and extended family, her home and business, the death of her husband, the assumption of guardianship of her children, her expansive real-estate empire, and, ultimately, her professional business collaboration with her three sons. Born into Montpellier's urban merchant elite, and married into the same, Martha's economic privilege and her status as a widow named guardian of her underage sons gave has significant freedom to make her mark as a business woman. With real estate she inherited from her own mother, she accumulated personal wealth, and on behalf of her sons, she engaged in Montpellier's mercantile world, shoring up the family business, which dealt in silk, mercery, and the processing and marketing of linens. We learn of her multipronged strategy for capitalizing her investments as a manager of monastic investments and as a farmer of rents due to ecclesiastic landlords. Far from simply rubber-stamping other people's strategies, Martha maintained and expanded the empire her husband left to their sons.

Reyerson's deep dive into the notarial sources situates the widowed mother within a complex network of kinship, business associates, dependents, and employees. She skillfully explains how Martha de Cabanis, molded and constrained as she was by her gender, showed incredible business acumen and initiative. De Cabanis jumps out from the page as a talented and entrepreneurial thinker, whose business instincts shifted as political forces moved. In the final chapter, in which Reyerson teases out the evolution of de Cabanis's investment strategies, we see the shift from her acting on her sons’ behalf to them acting as her procurators and managing some of her real-estate holdings. Thus, before she disappears from the documentary record (Reyerson speculates as to whether she might have died from the plague) the notarial acts, legal treatises, city chronicles, and comparable regional studies stitched together in this volume argue that Martha de Cabanis, though not singular in her achievements, was a woman whose managerial and financial skills were appreciated by and well integrated into the Montpellier economy.

No book is perfect, and this one suffers from a good bit of repetition, especially notable as it is relatively short overall. I also wonder why the names of Montpellier's denizens remained in the, to me, more distancing Latin rather than in the vernacular (for example, the three sons were Giraudus, Jacobus, and Johannes rather than Giraut, Jacme, and Johan). This, though, is simply a matter of preference. Overall, Mother and Sons, Inc. showcases the great benefit of writing from an archive one knows deeply and broadly, and models how historians should engage their historical imaginations to supplement the often-incomplete sources at their disposal.