Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries. There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of coverture applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal material from medieval and early modern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden, Norway and Germany enable a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of coverture was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book are married women'srights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts.
Author(s): Cordelia Beattie, Matthew Frank Stevens (eds.)
Series: Gender in the Middle Ages, 8
Publisher: The Boydell Press
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 260
City: Woodbridge
Figures and Tables vii
Contributors ix
Introduction: Uncovering Married Women / Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens 1
1. Inheritance, Property and Marriage in Medieval Norway / Lars Ivar Hansen 11
2. Spousal Disputes, the Marital Property System, and the Law in Later Medieval Sweden / Mia Korpiola 31
3. When Two Worlds Collide: Marriage and the Law in Medieval Ireland / Gillian Kenny 53
4. Married Women, Crime and the Courts in Late Medieval Wales / Lizabeth Johnson 71
5. Peasant Women, Agency and Status in Mid-Thirteenth- to Late Fourteenth-Century England: Some Reconsiderations / Miriam Müller 91
6. London’s Married Women, Debt Litigation and Coverture in the Court of Common Pleas / Matthew Frank Stevens 115
7. Married Women, Contracts and Coverture in Late Medieval England / Cordelia Beattie 133
8. Property, Family and Partnership: Married Women and Legal Capability in Late Medieval Ghent / Shennan Hutton 155
9. ‘For His Interest’? Women, Debt and Coverture in Early Modern Scotland / Cathryn Spence 173
10. The Worth of Married Women in the English Church Courts, c. 1550–1730 / Alexandra Shepard 191
11. Married Women, Work and the Law: Evidence from Early Modern Germany / Sheilagh Ogilvie 213
Index 241
