This is the first in-depth, comparative study of women's access to justice in medieval English towns. It compares the records of Nottingham, Chester and Winchester and a wide range of legal actions to highlight the variable nature of women's legal status in actions that arose from the complex, messy ties of everyday life.

This book provides a detailed analysis of women’s involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns – Nottingham, Chester and Winchester – and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women’s roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women’s legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women’s status was malleable, making each woman’s experience of justice unique.

The first comprehensive exploration of women's multifaceted experiences of forced and consensual ravishment in medieval England.

Utilizing a uniquely rich collection of trial records and council meeting minutes from late medieval Bologna, this book offers the first study of summary justice and oligarchy in an Italian commune, demonstrating how new legal institutions arose in response to the increasingly exclusionary policies of the popolo government.

Goldin’s study explores the relationships between men and women within Jewish society living in Germany, northern France and England among the Christian population over a period of some 350 years. Looking at original Hebrew sources to conduct a social analysis, he takes us from the middle of the tenth century until the middle of the second half of the fourteenth century, when the Christian population had expelled the Jews from almost all of the places they were living. Particularly fascinating are the attitudes towards women, as well as their changes in social status. By examining the factors involved in these issues, including views of the leadership, economic influences, internal power politics and gender struggles, Goldin's book provides a greater understanding of the functioning of these communities. This volume will be of great interest to historians of medieval Europe, gender and religion.

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and it not only serves as the major reference text in medieval and gender studies, but also provides an agenda for future new research.

This volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess' disability affected her life as Byzantine empress, how one unmarried Transylvanian woman who got pregnant dealt with being the center of a court case, and how enslaved women in medieval Hungary were treated as sexual property. The hope with this volume is that it will show the many interdisciplinary ways that women on the margins can be studied in this region, and to diminish the taboo of discussing this topic to begin with.