Florence Edler de Roover (1900–1987): Gender, Marriage, and the Career of a Medieval Business Historian

Abstract

This article examines the career of Florence Edler de Roover, whose Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business, Italian Series, 1200–1600 (1934) established her as a leading business historian of medieval Italy at a time when it was widely understood as the cradle of capitalism. Drawing on extensive archival sources, it traces Edler’s extraordinary formation as a scholar, her pivotal role in N. S. B. Gras’s business history program at Harvard Business School, and the gradual eclipse of her independent career following her marriage to the Belgian accountant and historian Raymond de Roover in 1936. Edler’s trajectory illuminates the conditions under which women’s contributions could be indispensable and yet become invisible in mid-twentieth-century American academia, but the article attends equally to Edler’s temperament, choices, ambitions, and self-fashioning, arguing that her career was shaped by the interplay of institutional constraint and personal agency. Her story also sheds new light on the gendered dimensions of the founding of business history in the United States—largely submerged in the existing scholarship—and on the uneasy relationship between business and economic history during her lifetime.