Social history aids in understanding women’s condition in any age; it is particularly essential for comprehending women in the Middle Ages, an era remote enough from our own so that common social presumptions do not pertain. As a discipline it demands that information gleaned from research be understood in the social context of the day, integrating knowledge at the expense, perhaps, of glamorous misconceptions of an earlier and exotic age. Such an approach dwells upon the ordinary with barely a mention of some of the more spectacular figures of the day, St. Joan, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and that host of...

In reconstructing the social and economic history of the early Middle Ages, perhaps the single, most salient obstacle to our research is the scant amount of information we possess concerning the household economy of the lay family: how the family managed its lands and divided its labors among its members. Our sources, overwhelmingly ecclesiastical in provenience, tell us fairly much of the organization of Church properties, and, through a few surviving royal records, we have some information too about royal estates.¹ But at all times in medieval Europe, non-royal lay families owned or controlled the larger portion of the soil....

The last several generations of medieval historians have made great strides in understanding and describing the inventiveness and resourcefulness of early medieval political and agrarian institutions. The battle is being won for the idea of early medieval vitality, and we are learning to recognize and appreciate the difficulties involved in the slow shifting of gears as one civilization becomes another. Yet, in one sense at least, the phrase “dark ages” is as accurate now as it was thought to be a hundred years ago. For despite all the progress historians have made, both in methodology and in perception and perspective,...

How does the legal and social position of women reflect the objectives and values of medieval Spanish society? The earliest documents which reveal the status of women in the Reconquest and repopulation of Christian Spain are the land charters (eighth to eleventh centuries) of the northern kingdoms of León, Castile, Navarre, and Aragon-Catalonia and the settlement charters (cartas pueblas or short fueros of the tenth and eleventh centuries) which confer legal, political, fiscal, economic, and social privileges upon the present and future populations of the small fortified settlements near the fluctuating frontiers between Christian and Muslim Spain. These texts date...

The organization of the family—the rights and duties of the husband, the wife, their descendants and dependents—has always had a profound effect on the entire body politic, in primitive societies as well as in highly developed states. The management and distribution of property necessitated extensive marital regulation in the ancient world, and with the establishment of the Christian church, a growing effort was made to legislate the moral aspects of marriage. Yet for centuries the most basic questions remained unresolved. What persons can marry one another? What are the privileges and obligations of the partners to a marriage?...

Although a murderess occasionally finds her place in fourteenth-century crime, she is less common than the thief, the burglar, or the receiver of stolen goods. Furthermore, female felons appear considerably less frequently than males both in medieval court records and also in modern British and American criminal statistics. Because the crime pattern of women differs somewhat from that of men in amount, methods, motivation, and types of crimes, a special study of their criminality is warranted. Such a study gives valuable information on at least one aspect of women’s activity in medieval society and is also helpful in giving an...

The early thirteenth century was an extraordinary period in the history of piety. Throughout Europe, and especially in urban communities, lay men and women were seized by a new religious fervor which could be satisfied neither by the new orders nor by the secular clergy. Lay groups proliferated, proclaiming the absolute and literal value of the gospels and practicing a new life-style, the vita apostolica.¹ This religious feeling led to the formation, on the eve of the fourth lateran council, of numerous orders of “poor men” and, shortly afterwards, to the foundation of the mendicant orders. From this novel interpretation...

The feudal family was dominated by the demands of its social and tenurial position. Land in Anglo-Norman England had been parcelled out on the basis of a society organized (at least theoretically) for war. By the late twelfth century, feudal land was clearly heritable though subject to the well-defined and heavy burdens of nonfiduciary guardianship, in which until the heir came of age and was able to do homage and fealty for the lands of his late father, both the land and the heir’s person were at the disposal of the feudal guardian.¹ The estate or estates of the deceased...

In the fifteenth canto of the Paradiso (11. 103–105) Dante wistfully observed that in contrast to his own time, the epoch of his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, did not see fathers taking fright at the birth of daughters. In those good old days, dowries had not yet “fled all limitation.” Dante may have been indulging in a familiar kind of romanticizing; certainly twelfth-century Florentine fathers also had to face responsibility for their daughters’ dowries. But his laments about the rise in dowries had plenty of echoes. In fact, the problems that the dowry institution itself, and especially dowry inflation, posed in...

Aristocratic women within the social context of medieval Ragusa (present day Dubrovnik) enjoyed the perquisites of upper-class life, citizenship, wealth, and family solidarity. They suffered under the burden of strict legal restriction, if Statute Law is to be believed. Social history, through interpreting the substantial chartulary resources of the Dubronvik State Archives, can help determine what balance was achieved in society between the advantages and the restrictions on their lives. Ragusa, small, aristocratic, and ambitious for a greater role in Mediterranean life, provides an excellent case study of the social position of the upper-class, urban woman.

Venice is frequently chosen...