Women's work and ... chocolate?

Left: the box top of Reber Constanz-Mozart-Kugeln; right: the delicious chocolates themselves (now eaten).

A friend of mine, an Austrian professor of theology, recently came for a visit and brought me a beautiful and delicious box of Reber Mozart-Kugeln (yummm ...).

Mozart-Kugeln are delicious, round chocolate confections filled with nougat, pistachio, and marzipan. This creation originated in Salzburg in 1880 with confectioner Rudolph Baumann, who named the candy to honor famous Salzburg composer Amadeus Mozart.

Mozart-Kugeln appear now in multiple formulations by different confectioners. The box my kind friend brought me was from the confectioner Paul Reber, and this variation was one I hadn't seen before, the box topped with a portrait of Constanz Mozart, wife to Amadeus.

My friend explained to me that this was a special edition box to honor the role Constanz played in her famous husband's life.

After salivating and eating three of these ultra-scrumptious bonbons, I decided to share this story here, because it's part of a larger trend that connects with my work and one that originated in—surprise!—medieval studies.

My friend, because she is awesome, picked out the Constanz-Mozart-Kugeln especially for me because of my academic work in shining a brighter light on medieval women.

Publicly boosting awareness of women's silent roles in the production of male-credited academic work started back in 2017 with fellow medievalist Bruce Holsinger and his #thanksfortyping campaign. (Tristan Bridges chronicles this history succinctly in his blog "Inequality by (Interior) Design".)

A few of Bruce's posts from that year:

And you can read even more about about this movement in a collection edited by Juliana Dresvina, Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History (Bloomsbury, 2021).

So maybe grab yourself some Constanz-Mozart-Kugeln (I think Reber will ship outside of the country!) and a copy of Dresvina's Thanks for Typing, and read some amazing stories. Here's to all the women behind the scenes (who should have gotten so much more credit).