Introduction

      Legal Texts and Gendered Contexts

      In twenty-first-century America, we have grown used to hearing that ours is a litigious society, to the point where it is easy to believe that our willingness to turn to the courts is without precedent. Historians of the premodern West, however, can point to other periods in which people regularly used formal litigation as a strategy not only to settle disputes but also to exact vengeance, to defame an enemy, or simply to make a statement. The later Middle Ages was one important chapter in this story: as medieval legal culture was transformed through the reintroduction and academic study of Roman and canon law, men and women proved eager to use that new law to construct and reconstruct social relationships.

      For medieval women, however, choosing to litigate posed special problems, as this choice entailed accepting the analytical categories of a learned law that largely identified women in terms of their relationship to a given man. This book examines the relationship between women and law in later medieval Spain, specifically in the composite monarchy known as the Crown of Aragon, exploring the ways that law categorized and defined women during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a period of intense jurisprudential activity in the Mediterranean. By examining unedited court records and locating them within the context of both prescriptive law codes and community expectations, I argue that women actively participated in the formation of the legal culture that sketched out the boundaries of their lives. The early fourteenth century represented a critical moment in the formation of legal ideas about women that would shape women’s lives for centuries to come. During this time, we can catch glimpses of the battle over women’s identity: the law did not precisely mirror women’s lives, but it did provide a vocabulary through which they attempted to define themselves in a world that was becoming increasingly legalized.

      While this book tells the story of women in one particular part of western medieval Europe, it is in a sense two books in one. The first of these is an attempt to sketch out the lived experience of women in one part of medieval Spain, to bring the story of Iberian women into the larger conversations about medieval women in general, rather than viewing them as exceptional, and thus irrelevant to the broader narrative of women in the Middle Ages. The second is an argument about the nature of the relationship between women, gender,