In the process, they played an important role in the formation of a gendered legal culture that would shape the lives of women throughout Western Europe and beyond for centuries to come.īestselling author Travis Hunter returns with a stunning new novel about family, success, and just how far a man will go to protect those he loves. Rather, medieval women actively used the conceptual vocabulary of the law, engaging with patriarchal legal assumptions as part of their litigation strategies.
The Measure of Woman reveals that women were not passive recipients-or even victims-of the legal system. Yet in spite of this situation, Kelleher argues, women were able to play a crucial role in shaping their own legal identities while working within the parameters of the written law. Aragonese courts measured women according to three factors: their status in relation to men, their relative sexual respectability, and their conformity to ideas about the female sex as a whole. Kelleher explores the complex relationship between women and legal culture in Spain's Crown of Aragon during the late medieval period.
Yet choosing to litigate entailed accepting the conceptual vocabulary of the learned law, thereby reinforcing the very legal and social notions that often subordinated them. Throughout medieval Europe, women regularly found themselves in court, suing or being sued, defending themselves against criminal accusations, or prosecuting others for crimes committed against them or their families. By the end of the Middle Ages, the ius commune-the combination of canon and Roman law-had formed the basis for all law in continental Europe, along with its patriarchal system of categorizing women.
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