In twenty-first-century America, we have grown used to hearing that ours is a litigious society, to the point where it is easy to believe that our willingness to turn to the courts is without precedent. Historians of the premodern West, however, can point to other periods in which people regularly used formal litigation as a strategy not only to settle disputes but also to exact vengeance, to defame an enemy, or simply to make a statement. The later Middle Ages was one important chapter in this story: as medieval legal culture was transformed through the reintroduction and academic study of...

In September 1303, Ermessenda de Cabrenys, a member of the minor nobility in the region around the northern Catalan city of Girona, was called to appear before the veguer and his official judge to answer charges against her. The documents do not specify the exact nature of her offense, except to say that she had violated the statutes of the Peace and Truce, but it likely involved one or more of the substantial debts that she had accumulated. An agreement for one of these, dated December 29, 1299, and bound together with the charges of the Peace and Truce violations,...

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...

In the previous chapter, we saw how an individual woman’s place in the law’s relational taxonomy of women (in this case, wife or widow) determined how she would engage with the gendered assumptions concerning female vulnerability and incapacity that permeated the legal culture of the later medieval Crown of Aragon. But a woman’s legal identity was also governed by a third factor that transcended both relational status and assumptions about female nature in general. The litigation surrounding the property rights of Agnes Pérez, a widow from the Aragonese town of Barbastro, provides an illustrative example. When Pedro Barbaros died in...

At the close of the previous chapter, we mentioned the case of Maria, daughter of Miquel de la Serra, whom the justicia of Cabanes d’Arc and his confederates publicly accused of being a whore. Verbal insults of this kind were common in the Middle Ages, and verbal violence directed against women tended to consist chiefly of slurs on their sexual promiscuity.¹ In Maria’s case, however, the violence went beyond public insult (which in itself could cause serious damage to a person’s reputation²) and into a severe physical beating. Perhaps most horrific to the modern sensibility is the fact that, despite...

By the year 1300, the legal system in the Crown of Aragon was firmly grounded in both the principles and procedures of the ius commune. Although areas of seigneurial jurisdiction, both lay and ecclesiastical, persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and although Jewish and Muslim aljamas maintained at least limited judicial autonomy, by the early fourteenth century, aspiring lawyers and jurists from throughout the Crown territories had been returning from law schools in Bologna and Montpellier for over a century, bringing with them the legal ideas that went into the creation of the great territorial law codes of the thirteenth century...