This chapter shows how income-generating work gave women a new axis and language of self-evaluation and enabled them to form relationships beyond their kin and neighbourhoods. It analyses expressions of women’s attitudes to their employment in religious dedications. It examines the social lives and networks of women in the commercial textile economy and considers how women’s remunerated labour affected household dynamics. It highlights the commercial relationships entailed by women’s involvement in supply chains of Attic sanctuaries and considers women’s interactions with clients and colleagues in markets and shops. It uses curse tablets aimed at women retailers and joint dedications made by colleagues as evidence for women acting as workers within commercial networks rather than family members in kinship networks. It concludes with two monuments connected with the doctor Phanostrate which attest to the possibility that relationships arising from work could take on the character of and even displace kin relationships.

The Introduction describes the shifting place of the Harley manuscript within English literary history. Following early promotion by nationalist antiquarians (impressed by its unique vernacular poems), the volume enjoyed a period of historiographical consequence, followed by decline into oblivion. After description of Harley 2253 as a material object and rehearsal of its publication history, there follows enumeration of thirteen ‘Aspects of the miscellany’ as a codicological form particular to this era. ‘Harley manuscript geographies’ next examines two related methodologies: first, the burgeoning subfield of ‘literary geography’, and second a materialist philology (or History of the Book) approach known as ‘manuscript geography’. Harley 2253 remains famous for certain Middle English items (chiefly, love-lyrics and political songs). Yet the compilation is linguistically mixed (containing Anglo-Norman and Latin), diverse of genre, and fascicular (produced in sections later stitched together). Appreciating the constitutive irony of Harley studies—that this variegated artefact, so often at odds with itself, keeps being sutured into ‘whole’-ness by commentary upon it—prepares the way for subsequent chapters. These undertakings are distinct textually and topically, but share a baseline proposition: that the Harley manuscript is a book interpretively produced, as much as it is a storehouse of vernacular treasures found.

Scholars equate medieval culture with death culture, but such conceptions derive from obsessions that developed in the wake of the Black Death. Texts that dance with death (or relocate us spiritually by means of it) are never far away in the Harley miscellany’s fifteen quires. But neither do we encounter quite so morbid an obsession with coming ‘endyngs’ as haunt later imaginations. After providing a primer on medieval death, ‘Dying with Harley 2253’ asks whether this compilation may, in its late-added final quire, function as a proto-Ars moriendi. Pre-eminent among plague-inspired genres, these multi-media ‘craft of dying’ handbooks served increasingly to script late medieval end-of-life experiences. But whatever genuflections its closing quire’s Anglo-Norman devotions and Latin treatises may perform, our manuscript’s earlier English pieces are not so easily overwritten. These lyric meditations propose death-facing trajectories and afterlife orientations that refuse to be theologically gainsaid. Harley 2253 archives multiple kinds of dying, and models plural approaches to the locational crisis (‘Wher next shal Y fare?’) that mortality produces. Appreciation of the sublime extremities to which medieval lyric delivers its audience helps demonstrate how contemporary encounters with lyric form—often just as death-bent—owe debts to early exemplars, the eschatologies of which underlie their own.

The conclusion summarises the book’s key findings: women could create and exploit diverse, cumulative networks as they moved through their lives; the instability of Attic family life led to a diversity of family structures, which women could construct in dialogue with patriarchal legal frameworks; women shaped the institution of slavery at the most intimate level; income-generating work saw women embrace new forms of self-value, expand their networks, and shape Athens’ economy and materiality; beyond the male institutions of the deme and phratry, women counter-normatively defined their own identities and relationships through their own institutions. It offers suggestions for future directions in scholarship and education. It reflects on how the study of ancient women centred around women’s engagement with other women, rather than their relationships to men, reveals the richness and dynamism of women’s social lives and their remarkable capacity to shape Athenian society and history.