Unequal Power and Sexual Consent: The Case of Cassotte la Joye

In 1386, something troubling, damaging, and potentially violative happened to Cassotte la Joye. She had a sexual relationship with a man named Jean Ayore and became pregnant by him, but he would neither marry her nor support their child. Cassotte went to the diocesan court in Paris to seek justice for what Jean had done to her and she had reason to believe that the court might help her as it had other women in her position.¹ But Cassotte was socially marginalized in respect to Jean, and disadvantaged in terms of her gender and single status, and the court did not help her. She claimed that Jean had made her future promises of marriage followed by sexual relations, which had resulted in her defloration (defloratione) and left her with child.² Cassotte's claims indicated that she and Jean should have been married, as promising to marry someone and then having sex created a binding marriage contract.³ Jean confessed to the sexual intercourse and the offspring, but would not confess that he had promised to marry Cassotte. Cassotte had no witnesses, so on the claim of future promises to marry she resorted to using the decisory oath, which meant that Jean was asked to swear on his soul that he had not promised to marry her.⁴ He swore he had not, and the court decided the case in a rather unusual manner, absolving him of all of the claims despite the fact that he had admitted to the offspring. They also stated that Cassotte must not "impede" ("ne impediat") him any further.⁵ In no other marriage case in the register did the court use such language, and in the other cases that involve combinations of deflowering and future promises to marry it was the male party who was tasked with demonstrating that the woman was not a virgin before they had sex. The court did not ask Jean to prove that Cassotte was deflowered by someone else, nor did they order him to pay her any sum for the pregnancy and child.⁶ Cassotte appears to have had sex with Jean expecting that they would be married afterwards. Instead, the relationship left her as a single mother, with no monetary support from the father of her child.

While Cassotte's case is not one that would typically be used in a study of rape in the Middle Ages, the field of medieval sexual violence needs to turn toward such cases because they stimulate questions about how we define sexual violations and rape in the past, and because they allow us to investigate the unequal power dynamics that underpin heterosexual relationships and undermine consent. Cassotte's case highlights how power could be leveraged in sexual relationships between unequal partners, and demonstrates the inability of consent to prevent harm in such relationships.

Though scholars of medieval history have produced many studies of rape, rarely have they interrogated what types of sources should be included in a study of rape in the past, nor have they until very recently given much attention to sexual consent. This is partially due to the fact that the sources typically used to study rape do not offer many avenues for analyzing those sexual violations that fell outside the narrow legal definition of rape. The definition of rape from Philippe de Beaumanoir's thirteenth-century customary law collection Coutumes de Beauvaisis offers one such limited legal interpretation : "Rape is when one has by force the carnal company of a woman against the will of that woman and when she does everything in her power to defend herself."⁷ Rape is thus defined as a gendered crime that only victimizes women, and as a crime that includes force against which the victim must actively resist. It also must be against the will of the victim/survivor.⁸ Though Beaumanoir's definition of rape was not necessarily widely used at the time, legal sources representing an array of jurisdictions in France reflect similar such definitions: letters of remission often denote rape by using the phrase "had...