Winner of the 2024 La corónica International Book Award

Sarah Ifft Decker (she/her), assistant professor of history at Rhodes College, is the winner of the 2024 La corónica International Book Award.

The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) is a social and economic history of women’s work in three Catalan cities—Barcelona, Girona, and Vic—between 1250 and 1350. It explores how gender and religious identity intertwined to shape the labor options available to Jewish and Christian women in the medieval Mediterranean. Jewish women played a far more circumscribed role than their Christian counterparts in most economic sectors.

The Fruit of Her Hands exposes the limitations of historical narratives that emphasize a shared, inter-religious Mediterranean culture. Even while embedded in an economy and society that necessitated interfaith encounters, religious communities employed gender roles to construct cultural difference.