The Measure of Woman
THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
The
Measure of Woman
Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon
Marie A. Kelleher
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA • OXFORD
Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kelleher, Marie A.
The measure of woman : law and female identity in the crown of Aragon / Marie A. Kelleher.
p. cm. — (Middle ages series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4256-0 (alk. paper)
1. Women—Legal status, laws, etc.—Spain—History. 2. James II, King of Aragon, ca. 1264–1327. I. Title.
| KKT517.K45 2010 | |
| 346.4601'34—dc22 | 2009049138 |
To Jim BrundageFor patience, wisdom, and generosityabove and beyond the call of duty
Contents
Introduction: Legal Texts and Gendered Contexts
Chapter 1. Drawing Boundaries: Women in the Legal Landscape in the Age of Jaume II
Chapter 2. The Power to Hold: Women and Property
Chapter 3. Crimes of Passion: Sexual Transgression and the Legal Taxonomy of Women
Chapter 4. Gender and Violence
A Note on Names
The cases in this book are drawn from the records of a composite monarchy in which the inhabitants, in the Middle Ages as today, spoke and wrote in more than one language. I have done my best to consistently render names from the kingdom of Aragon in Castilian, and those from the Catalan counties and the kingdom of Valencia in Catalan. Monarchs referenced in the text are named and numbered according to the Catalan sequence:
| Pere I | 1196–1213 |
| Jaume I | 1213–1276 |
| Pere II | 1276–1285 |
| Alfons II | 1285–1291 |
| Jaume II | 1291–1327 |
| Alfons III | 1327–1336 |
| Pere III | 1336–1387 |
Peninsular territories of the Crown of Aragon, ca. 1291–1336.
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,