Hers by Right: Gendered Legal Assumptions and Women's Property in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

This article explores women's property rights in the Crown of Aragon (Spain) during the high Middle Ages, focusing on the gendered legal assumptions that governed women's economic lives. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Iberian jurists came under the influence of Roman law, which assumed a male-dominated household economy. Yet medieval women had long exercised substantial property rights that could not simply be abrogated by the new legal culture. An examination of women's litigation from the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon, placed in the context of particular Roman legal principles that influenced the way cases were adjudicated, reveals a paradox: women's litigation to assert independent property rights depended on the use of laws that were grounded in an assumption of married women's subordination to their husbands. Women's own litigation thus helped to solidify a gendered legal system that would shape women's economic lives for centuries thereafter.