UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that pre-Reformation policing of women’s sexuality in England was much more tolerant than recent scholarship has contended, and that women were adept in using the resources available to them in terms of their networks within the community to navigate the ecclesiastical and civil courts. The project is animated by an often-overlooked gap between the official rhetoric about women’s sexuality and practical jurisprudence, i.e., the day-to-day records of indictments, prosecutions, and outcomes. Most women brought to court for sexual misbehavior escaped punishment. Previous scholarship has explained this apparently lax system as evidence of the ineffectiveness of mechanisms of social control before the Elizabethan rise of the state. My original research shows that this was not the case. When women got off, the system was working as intended.

Chapter 1 examines the language of the court records of women accused of sexual misbehavior, utilizing Latin and English language court records to demonstrate that authorities had a nuanced understanding of women’s sexual misbehavior that was obfuscated by the conventions of late medieval legal Latin. Chapter 2 engages with the scholarly debate about women’s sexual reputations and argues that women at the lower end of the social hierarchy were less concerned with their reputations than they were with using the social capital of their male friends to maintain their place, however debased, in their communities. Chapter 3 looks at the late medieval justice system through the lens of restorative justice and argues that this system reflected a focus on restoration rather than retribution. Chapter 4 looks at the elaborate shaming punishments prescribed for women convicted of sexual misbehavior in the context of the culture of performance during the period. Finally, a coda suggests how this research can offer new approaches to feminist medieval historians.