Drawing on hundreds of unpublished court records, Marie Kelleher examines how women in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon engaged with patriarchal assumptions to shape their own legal identities, thus playing a crucial role in the formation of a gendered legal culture that shaped women's lives throughout Europe for centuries afterwards.

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

Marie A. Kelleher

2010 | 232 pages | Cloth $55.00
Cultural Studies | Women's/Gender Studies | Law
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Table of Contents

A Note on Names
Map

Introduction: Legal Texts and Gendered Contexts
Chapter 1. Drawing Boundaries: Women in the Legal Landscape in the Age of Jaume II
Chapter 2. The Power to Hold: Women and Property
Chapter 3. Crimes of Passion: Sexual Transgression and the Legal Taxonomy of Women
Chapter 4. Gender and Violence
Conclusions

List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments