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

Chapter 2. The Power to Hold: Women and Property

Chapter 2 The Power to Hold: Women and Property The conjugal life of Sibila and her husband Pere de Sala ended badly. In 1329, in the first of what turned out to be a series of bitter court battles, Sibila alleged that her husband had abandoned her and their daughter and had maliciously refused to support either of them financially; she was, therefore, suing her husband for the financial support owed her.1 Pere, the batlle of the Catalan town of Borredà, lodged a counter-complaint that his wife was a notorious adulteress—a circumstance that would have legally absolved him of any obligation to either her or her daughter. As far as Pere was concerned, his wife had forfeited any claim on the financial support to which her dowry should have entitled her, and she and her child were on their own.2 This chapter will focus on the gendered relationship between women’s economic position and the law. Unlike the much-studied phenomenon of the medieval English common law’s feme covert (an adult woman whose legal personality was “covered” by her spouse),3 women in the Crown of Aragon maintained legal personalities distinct from those of their husbands, fathers, and other male relatives. This does not mean, however, that they were equal in the eyes of the law. In the area of property in particular, the romanizing law codes of the later medieval Crown of Aragon assumed a distinctly unequal relationship between men and women, with all economic decisions being made by the male head of household. This particular assumption is implicit in all written law about women’s property rights and, as such, colored the existence of medieval women. Questions surrounding women’s access to and control of property in the Middle Ages have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship, generally undertaken with a view to describing the social effects of gendered property Women and property 49 law.4 This chapter asks a slightly different set of questions, revolving around the legal assumptions that underpinned both laws and litigation and the way that shifts in these underlying assumptions produced changes in women’s ability to control their economic lives. Beginning with a survey of law codes from throughout the Crown of Aragon and samples of dotal contracts from judicial districts around the northwestern Mediterranean, I will briefly outline the way that this particular society conceived of women’s relationship to their dotal properties. Having established the economic landscape of the later medieval household as background, the core of this chapter will examine litigation between women and their husbands or husbands’ families regarding dotal properties , the outcome of which often depended upon conflicting interpretations of legal principles that had been developed more than a millennium earlier during the time of the Roman Empire. Women’s property litigation reveals an internal contradiction in Catalano-Aragonese law, which sought simultaneously to protect women’s property rights and to enforce a patriarchal household structure that gave the male head of household full administrative rights over and responsibilities for the family economy. An investigation of the ways in which jurists, family members, and women themselves negotiated between these two imperatives not only adds to our understanding of women’s historical relationship to property law, but also shows how women adjusted their litigation strategies to engage with the gendered assumptions that underpinned those laws. More specifically, we find both widows and married women representing themselves in court in terms of an inherent female vulnerability and dependency that the purpose and outcome of their own litigation belie. Dowry: Law and Practice Called the ajuar in Aragon, axuar in Catalonia, and exovar in Valencia, dowry in the Crown of Aragon (as in the rest of medieval Europe) consisted of the property that a woman’s family of origin bestowed on her at the time of her marriage.5 Legally, dowry could consist of either moveable or immovable goods, though in practice cash dowries dominated during this period. In a survey of fifteen dotal instruments preserved in the municipal archive of Girona during the reign of Jaume II, dowries ranged from 200 sous (for a marriage between a baker’s daughter and a shoemaker)6 to 3,000 sous plus a significant trousseau (for a marriage between two families of the local minor aristocracy).7 Discounting these two as outliers, far from the mean, the average 50 chapter 2 dowry...