Z
The definition of what constitutes "middle class" has been elastic depending on what timeframe you look at (and more often than not what your political leanings are). And in frankness the idea of a "middling class" didn't really solidify until the late 1700s, which, even if you're being generous about the length of the Renaissance, puts it about 200 years after the approximate end, while the definition you've chosen for middle class comes from the 1800s, and is reflective of the social, economic, and political circumstances of that timeframe. The Bookverse economy however is not nearly as advanced as that, and thus does not delineate its socio-economic classes the way you seem to think. The biggest problem with you trying to frame any of the Bookverse characters with "modern day" counterparts is that the general consumption levels do not match, at all. The buying power of people you term to be in the "middle class" like the shopkeepers or workshop foremen is drastically, drastically lower than the nominally equivalent modern day counterparts.
There seems to be this continued misconception about just how wealthy, or rather poor, the majority of the commoners in the Bookverse are, and how much of their income is taken up by daily essentials to the point where they have little or no discretionary spending ability. Let's take Myne's own family as an example. Effa is a dyer, which functionally creates a mostly decorative item for consumption, of which the only people that'd buy such a thing would be those that have some money to begin with. So she's already in a business that sells to people with money. She'd also qualify as a skilled craftsman, so her level of pay certainly cannot be below par for the Bookverse as a whole, considering the amount of time one needs to learn anything in the Bookverse, with their lack of formal technical training and whatnot. Then there's Gunther, who even before his promotion to gate commander, was still clearly at least a shift captain, so he's moved from the lowest tier to middling as far as the hierarchy of the city guard goes. So both of them arguably have jobs that should put them at a middle level tier as far as the rest of their social class is concerned. Even so, their purchasing power is demonstrated to be extremely low, on combination of where they live and remarks about their overall food budget. This should not be treated as some exception, even with Myne's health thrown into the mix. This is by all indications the level of spending power people of their class, which includes two working adults who have jobs that are far higher than mere entry level, are making. Working class, but at skilled tradesmen levels. And Effa arguably by working with dyes at all is providing for a far richer segment of the market than likely a good chunk of her fellow seamstresses.
The consequence of this ripples upward, because if Effa and Gunther represent the average purchasing power of the commoner class, that means those businesses that service them aren't going to be racking in lots of cash either, and the bulk of the businesses in the commoner quarters does just that. The workshops we see with Myne are arguably the most successful workshops in the entire city, since she is getting introduced to them by Benno, and Benno has need of their services when he's selling to the nobility. But the businesses like the restaurant that Gunther visited or the food stalls Effa frequents are more indicative of the actual earning capacity of commoner businesses in Ehrenfest. They don't make that much, and businesses quite clearly go bust with regularity or are often at risk of it, like with how Ella's uncle's restaurant was having problems paying the guild dues he owed.
What this means is that the buffering effect that a "middle" class is supposed to offer is functionally absent. Very, very few of the business owners have the margin to provide that buffer, so functionally they may as well be indistinguishable from their fellow working class compatriots. Those that do have that margin, they're the very upper crust of Ehrenfest's commoner sphere. But even they are at fair risk of seeing their businesses fail, since the source of their wealth, is the mercurial nobility. And the wealth this commoner upper crust commands is far, far out of proportion to that the lower tier of shop owners or workshop foremen possess. From a purchasing power perspective, the disparity is closer to that of a well paid CEO to the janitor that mops the floor of not the CEO's office, but the cubicle room of the entry-level employees. Yes, it's that extreme. No, Myne herself didn't even really grasp this, this is something we readers had to discern for ourselves based on our own familiarity with history.
The remark about clothing is also a gross misreading of what I said. I was talking about production methods and design practices. Saying that a certain type of "sleeve" serves as concrete proof of a certain timeframe, when the society the story takes place in is not ours, is what I was pointing out doesn't necessarily work. The Bookverse has an extremely uneven technological frame of reference, they have some things that clearly came from later periods, and some things they're missing that should have been available centuries beforehand. That's why a single piece of technology or style, which clothing certainly represents, isn't enough to be able to gauge the social stage of the Bookverse. The existence, or in frankness functional absence, of a "middle" class, along with the type of stratification that exists, tells us much more about where they are socially.
