The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon

Chapter 3. Crimes of Passion: Sexual Transgression and the Legal Taxonomy of Women

Chapter 3 Crimes of Passion: Sexual Transgression and the Legal Taxonomy of Women In the previous chapter, we saw how an individual woman’s place in the law’s relational taxonomy of women (in this case, wife or widow) determined how she would engage with the gendered assumptions concerning female vulnerability and incapacity that permeated the legal culture of the later medieval Crown of Aragon. But a woman’s legal identity was also governed by a third factor that transcended both relational status and assumptions about female nature in general. The litigation surrounding the property rights of Agnes Pérez, a widow from the Aragonese town of Barbastro, provides an illustrative example. When Pedro Barbaros died in the late 1320s, Agnes, like many of the widows in the previous chapter, stepped in to assume full responsibility for the household he left behind. Agnes became sole guardian of her daughters and administrator of her late husband’s estate on their behalf. Not everyone was satisfied with this arrangement, however: Juana Pérez de Castellret, sister of the late Pedro, went to court to contest Agnes’s wardship of her daughters and her administration of the estate. According to Juana, it was widely rumored after Pedro’s death that Agnes had committed adultery with another resident of the town and that he had impregnated her; Juana therefore claimed that Agnes was now fraudulently possessing and alienating her daughters’ goods.1 This case, in which a woman’s position as guardian and administrator was being contested because of her reputation in the community, is an example of the transformation of social fama into legally actionable terms, as described in Chapter 1. The procedural rules of the ius commune allowed law courts to consider new types of evidence—including rumor, reputation, and 82 chapter 3 common knowledge—or to evaluate old types of evidence in new ways. This new approach to evidence strengthened women’s position in relation both to the law courts and to their communities in some cases but worked against them in others, as the not-always-disinterested surveillance of relatives and neighbors came into play. The various law codes of the Crown of Aragon laid out women’s economic privileges, but an individual woman’s ability to claim those privileges could be challenged, and those challenges, begun in the daily interactions of neighbors, formed a critical part of the legal discourse surrounding the status of women. This chapter approaches the intersection of law, gender, and community reputation by analyzing sexual offenses committed by women belonging to three relational categories: married women, widows, and single women. While the previous chapter showed how women engaged with legal assumptions based on their marital status to exercise personal and financial autonomy, the cases in this chapter illustrate a parallel aspect of women’s relationship to legal culture: their relative success in litigation depended not only on their relation to a given man but also upon how well they conformed to expectations for proper behavior within that category.2 No matter what their marital status , women were subject to the binary distinction between respectable and disreputable as determined by the interaction of statute law and community perception. In some ways, the treatment of women’s sexual offenses reinforced the learned law’s categories for women. At the same time, however, an analysis of women based solely on the relational categories set out in the law codes has the potential to mislead. Adultery Law and Gender Assumptions Our understanding of adultery as a prosecutable offense must begin with the fundamental question of how it related to both sex and gender (female) and relational category (married). As with much of the law outlined in earlier chapters, later medieval adultery law had its basis in the legal ideas of the ius commune. Roman and canon law differed, however, in their interpretation of the relationship between sexuality and gender, leaving a complicated legacy to women in the Crown of Aragon. Roman law tended toward a highly gendered interpretation, firmly linking adultery to biological sex, marital status, and respectability. The emperor Augustus’s Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis (18 B.C.E.) uses the terms adulterium and stuprum (illicit sexual activity or sexuaL transgressIon and LegaL taxonomy 83 seduction) interchangeably, but it also frequently refers to the matrona or the materfamilias,3 suggesting a legal understanding of adultery as illicit sexual activity by or with a married woman...