Introduction

These excellent essays illustrate how, in the words of author Angelita Reyes, "legal sources serve to dramatize aspects of lived experience" and so demonstrate the complexity and relevance of these sources to the history of women and gender. As Durba Ghosh shows for colonial India and Jungwon Kim for Chosŏn Korea, legal testimony brings the experiences of women into the light of historical inquiry as few other sources can. In particular, the lives of non-elites, about whom there is often very little evidence, are channeled by a variety of actors into the courtroom and into documents generated by civil process and litigation. Historians of gender and sexuality often must work to dispel students' assumptions that in the past people were somehow more "moral" and less transgressive than we are, especially as relates to sexuality. Legal sources effectively show men and women wrestling with historically specific questions related to desire, sexual reputation, shame, and honor. As Ghosh reminds us, legal sources "materialize the body," making visible the stakes for each person involved.

Issues of gender, sexuality, class, and race do not divide neatly within human experience. Carolyn Strange shows how these categories, experiences, and motives merged within the lives of the Ontario women she studies, just as Lynne Curry's essay challenges students to identify the social, cultural, economic, and political strands that came together in the "landmark case" of Roe v. Wade. Their approaches allow students the opportunity to speculate about the choices made by legal actors, the strategies they pursued, and the level of intent and agency that these women and men may or may not have exercised.

The complicated question of agency allows instructors to introduce students to the range of debates among social and cultural historians about agency, its definition, reconstruction, and limits. Although one can debate the extent of any instance of historical agency, Angelita Reyes and Mary Beth Sievens demonstrate that teaching the history of women and gender with legal sources reveals women's experience with the law, their conversance with it, and their strategic choices. Such discussions often defy student expectations by demonstrating that women were both active legal agents and the victims of unanticipated, unsought consequences, both positive and negative, of their actions and choices.

These essays reveal the law as organic and always changing: thoroughly permeated, imprinted, and reshaped by human experience and interpretation. Examining the legal institutions and statutes alongside cases, as Mary Ann Fay does in her essay on Qur'anic verses and shari'a, students clearly observe the law's production through the ubiquitous disparity between prescription and practice and the historical experience of their negotiation by a range of social groups and interests. The study of these legal sources confirms and substantiates Joan Scott's contention that gender is created through these interactions. While legal prescriptions attempted to cement definitions of gender and appropriate ways to perform and enact them, practice unraveled these definitions in unpredictable but culturally and historically specific ways. Ann Waltner's approach places Ming and Qing legal codes alongside legal cases, animating the law and contrasting prescription's attempts to tie down and define dominant values with lived experience that contradicts, circumvents, or eludes them. The responses of the women and men, defendants, prosecutors, attorneys, judges and jurors, who navigated these legal prescriptions of gender roles created, negotiated, and redefined gender as they sought to produce the outcome most beneficial to them or to their ideological goals. Students emerge from these discussions with a more nuanced appreciation of the co-constituitive nature of gender, law, and community.

Of course, legal sources must be used with a few caveats. Students may think that they know how to approach and interpret these sources because of their exposure to books, movies, and television shows that track crime from discovery through investigation, trial, and punishment. The immediacy of a trial transcript is not without its pitfalls. Although it is tempting to imagine a trial transcript as a complete recording of a legal proceeding, instructors must provide the historical and the legal context in which the sources were produced. Assignments that ask students to corroborate the details related in a...