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

Chapter 4. Gender and Violence

Chapter 4 Gender and Violence At the close of the previous chapter, we mentioned the case of Maria, daughter of Miquel de la Serra, whom the justicia of Cabanes d’Arc and his confederates publicly accused of being a whore. Verbal insults of this kind were common in the Middle Ages, and verbal violence directed against women tended to consist chiefly of slurs on their sexual promiscuity.1 In Maria’s case, however, the violence went beyond public insult (which in itself could cause serious damage to a person’s reputation2 ) and into a severe physical beating. Perhaps most horrific to the modern sensibility is the fact that, despite the numerous witnesses to Maria’s assault, not a single person came to her aid.3 I have argued that this startling circumstance was due to the fact that Maria’s sexual reputation had compromised her legal and social personhood to the point where she could be violently attacked with near impunity. But to what degree, if at all, is Maria’s case a reflection of the experience of female victims of violence in general? This chapter argues that violence against women existed at the intersection of law, community reputation, and larger discourses of gender and relational category: while the law afforded women protections against violence that accorded with legal assumptions of female vulnerability, female litigants in these cases had to argue in such a way as to prove they were respectable enough to merit such protections, and by so doing , they helped to solidify gendered legal assumptions about deserving versus undeserving women. gender and VIoLence 113 Domestic Abuse Domestic abuse was one circumstance that prompted women to active use of the legal system. One study of violent crime in the later medieval Crown of Aragon has found that 16 percent of violent acts involving women took place within the immediate family. Of these cases, a woman was the victim 70 percent of the time, and in the great majority of these cases the woman’s husband was the perpetrator.4 In spite of this fact, law codes from the Crown of Aragon have little to say on the subject of spousal abuse, since the primary venue for domestic violence cases would have been the ecclesiastical courts, where women could sue for separation on grounds of cruelty. Furthermore, legislators may have believed that a certain degree of physical violence within a marriage was to be expected and should be left as a matter for a household’s internal governance, rather than for legislation.5 Nevertheless, records from the royal courts show that secular judicial officials occasionally encountered cases involving domestic violence, even if the violence itself was not the main object of litigation, and they therefore had to develop legal tools to deal with the issue. The first thing to note in domestic violence cases is who brought the charges: the assault cases that will be analyzed in this section were variously brought by women themselves, by a procurator on a woman’s behalf, or by unspecified parties. In none of the cases, however, did officials prosecute abuse ex officio (as, we shall see below, they did in cases involving spousal murder). Perhaps unexpectedly, these cases do not show married women depending on networks of family or friends to bring their cases to court. This absence of family involvement seems odd, especially when considered in light both of findings for other parts of Europe,6 and of evidence from the Crown of Aragon for other, nonabuse cases, such as the adultery prosecutions discussed in Chapter 3, that show families involved in the lives of their married daughters. There are several possible reasons for this discrepancy. Families who maintained close ties with their married daughters may have been more likely to make private agreements to control their abusive sons-in-law. Alternatively, women who could draw on family resources may have found litigation either unnecessary or simply more trouble than it was worth, whether in terms of finances or of family honor. It is important to remember that in the fourteenth century, as in the twenty-first, bringing a case to court required the expenditure of considerable time, effort, and financial resources and could readily give rise to both scandal and recrimination, with no guarantee of outcome. In this context, 114 chapter 4 while neighbors and family may well have been, as Julie Hardwick has argued, the “arbiters of acceptable...