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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 2 IntroductIon 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, and legal culture. The way these women told their stories in court (either by themselves or through their legal representatives) and the way other people told stories about them reveals more than merely how women fit into their communities and the extent to which their experience adhered to gendered cultural norms enshrined in law. The process of litigation itself reveals women’s active participation in the assimilation of a gender system encoded in a centuries-old law that was coming into new prominence across the European continent during the later Middle Ages. In order to be effective litigators, women had to represent themselves in ways that fit within the boundaries of gender as imagined in the legal sources. But by so doing, they helped to reify the gender assumptions that underpinned the substantive law, even if the details of these women’s own stories belied those very assumptions. Turning first to the question of medieval Iberian women in general, probably the most important English-language book on this subject to date is Heath Dillard’s Daughters of the Reconquest. Writing over twenty-five years ago, Dillard noted that the scholarly treatments of the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula had ignored the contributions of women. Working with the law codes of Castile during the high medieval period of Christian settlement, Dillard sketched out a picture of women’s lives, read explicitly in a frontier context, arguing that women were vital in the Christian resettlement efforts and that their presence was essential in turning frontier garrisons into thriving Christian towns.1 The writing and publication of Dillard’s book should be read in the context of two scholarly trends at the time: a growing interest in women among medievalists in Spain, led by scholars like Teresa Maria Vinyoles i Vidal and Cristina Segura Graíño, and new research from Anglo-American scholars on the lives of ordinary women in premodern societies, spearheaded by scholars working in English and Italian archives. Interest...

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