Editor's Note

In dueling book reviews in Signs in 1990, historians Joan Scott and Linda Gordon linked scholarly inquiry about domestic violence to larger philosophical issues about the significance of a materialist analysis versus the linguistic turn.¹ The authors of the articles included in this special issue on domestic violence have been influenced much more by Scott than by Gordon, and tend to emphasize the role of one or several discourses in shaping understandings of and interventions in domestic violence. These discourses turn out to be legal, communal, medical, fictional, and feminist, sometimes in concert with each other, and other times oppositional and contradictory. Several of the authors—of both the articles in this issue as well as the books under review—are interested in discourses of domestic violence produced by such elite authorities as criminologists and judges, as well as those generated in such print media as widely-read newspapers; attention to both allows them to explore the relationship of hegemonic discourses to more popular ways of speaking about domestic violence.

By contrast, the authors of the book reviews tend to question the importance of discourse analysis and are more influenced by ideas of intersectionality (especially the reciprocal relationship between gender and race) or by transnational feminisms. Even so, most of the authors of the articles and book reviews endorse the point of view that intimate partner violence is related to power struggles in a household with men clearly enjoying the upper hand and that the inequality of women in marriage and the household is a problem of injustice for women and for children. The historical study of domestic violence has never been concerned just with understanding the phenomenon itself but also with providing insights into the nature of marriage as an institution; gender norms; the body; and the division between public and private. Even so, Malavika Kasturi reminds us that the ultimate goal of feminist scholarship on this subject is "to agitate against and oppose the abuse perpetrated on women's bodies by patriarchies, communities, and states."

The term "domestic violence" is, of course, of recent coinage. Applying it to periods before the late twentieth century is, then, always anachronistic. Some of the authors represented here have chosen to write about "domestic violence," while others employ more specific terms (infanticide, female circumcision, incest, rape) or terms used in the periods they are examining (wife beating, cruelty, crimes of passion). At the center of most of these articles and reviews is intimate partner violence between adults, but attention is also paid to infanticide and the murder of older children, attacks by masters on servants and slaves, and what are often called today crimes against women (genital mutilation, rape, and the glorification of suicide among women who felt their virtuous sexual reputation had been slandered).

Susan McDonough's study of Silona Calverie of Marseilles, who in 1424 brought charges against her husband for misappropriating her dowry and physical abuse, is based on a court case for which the judge's verdict is unknown. It is important, then, for what it tells us about the attitudes of the victim, her husband, and the witnesses, who, as her neighbors, represented the interests of the community. It is significant that the witnesses supported Calverie's claim to her property, but did not want to permit her to live separately from her husband. Their fear of the disruptive potential of a woman living alone, outside of male household government, is representative of much more widespread medieval attitudes toward singlewomen, who were very often viewed as a disorderly element in society.

Singlewomen also play a prominent role in Sara M. Butler's study of child murder in late medieval England. Butler shows that the killing of infants and young children was not, as some scholars have argued, treated with indifference by courts or by royal officials. But her analysis of court records demonstrates that medieval jurors did adopt a gendered approach in indicting, prosecuting, and sentencing cases of child murder. In particular, the killing of infants up to the age of one seems to have been considered a singlewoman's crime, whereas the murder of...