Download PDF | Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues, Lorenzo Caravaggi, Giulia M. Paoletti - Women and Violence in the Late Medieval Mediterranean, ca. 1100-1500-Routledge (2021).
239 Pages
This pioneering work explores the theme of women and violence in the late medieval Mediterranean, bringing together medievalists of different specialties and methodologies to offer readers an updated outline of how different disciplines can contribute to the study of gender-based violence in medieval times.
Building on the contributions of the social sciences, and in particular feminist criminology, the book analyses the rich theme of women and violence in its full spectrum, including both violence committed against women and violence perpetrated by women themselves, in order to show how medieval assumptions postulated a tight connection between the two. Violent crime, verbal offences, war, and peace-making are among the themes approached by the book, which assesses to what extent coexisting elaborations on the relationship between femininity and violence in the Mediterranean were conflicting or collaborating. Geographical regions explored include Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world.
This multidisciplinary book will appeal to scholars and students of history, literature, gender studies, and legal studies.
Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She is currently a Marie Sktodowska-Curie Fellow at the Universita di Milano Statale. She held research positions in the UK, Canada, and Italy. Her work focuses on the influence of Christian spirituality on the development of criminal justice in the late medieval Italian communes.
Lorenzo Caravaggi completed his doctorate at Balliol College, University of Oxford, with a thesis on the dynamics of peacekeeping in late-medieval Italy. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The University of East Anglia, with a project on the ethical and literary underpinnings of criminal law in fourteenth-century Europe.
Giulia M. Paoletti holds an M.St. in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. She was awarded an Ernst Mach Grant to work at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her work focuses on Byzantine poetry, monastic literature and more broadly on the Palaiologan period.
Contributors
Lucie Arrighi (University of Corsica)
Bio: Lucie Arrighi est l’ auteure d’une these de doctorat en ‘études romanes’ soutenue a Sorbonne Université, en janvier 2019. Spécialiste de ’historiographie corse des quinziéme et seizieme siécles, elle fait actuellement partie du projet FEDER ‘les Espaces de la Corse Médiévale’ (ECM) sur |’édition numérique du premier récit historique corse congu au quinziéme siécle par Giovanni della Grossa.
Philippa Byrne (University of Oxford)
Bio: Philippa Byrne is Departmental Lecturer in History at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her research examines the intellectual history of the Mediterranean world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Lorenzo Caravaggi (University of East Anglia)
Bio: Lorenzo Caravaggi completed his doctorate at Balliol College, University of Oxford, with a thesis on the dynamics of peacekeeping in late-medieval Italy. He is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The University of East Anglia, with a project on the ethical and literary underpinnings of criminal law in fourteenth-century Europe.
Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Bio: Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm is a historian of medieval Italy’s society and politics. His articles have appeared in journals including Renaissance Quarterly. A monograph, The Social Politics of Criminal Justice in a Medieval Commune, is scheduled for 2022 publication with Routledge.
Nina KrSljanin (University of Belgrade)
Bio: Nina KrSljanin is Assistant Professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, Department of Legal History. She has a PhD in medieval Serbian law (‘Serbian medieval charters as the source of DuSan’s Code’). Her other research areas include parliamentary history, customary law, legal position of women and gender studies.
Carol Lansing (University of California, Santa Barbara) Bio: Carol Lansing is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specialises in Italian social and cultural history in the thirteenthand early fourteenth centuries and has published a series of articles on low status women in the thirteenth century. Her current research is a reconstruction of the culture and social organisation of elites in southern Lazio.
Maximilian Lau (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo)
Bio: Maximilian Lau is Adjunct Professor of History at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, and a Research Associate at St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford. He wrote his doctorate at Oxford on the reign of the Byzantine Emperor John II Komnenos. His research now focuses on the global Middle Ages, such as the role of non-sovereign elites and the concept of the common good in pre-modern societies.
Loek Luiten (University of Oxford)
Bio: Loek Luiten recently finished his doctorate on the fifteenth-century history of the Farnese family at the University of Oxford. He is interested in late-medieval and early modern cultural politics and diplomacy, and pursued research on the use of food gifts, hospitality, concubinage, and violence in Quattrocento Italy.
Alberto Luongo (Universita per Stranieri di Siena)
Bio: Alberto Luongo is currently post-doctoral research fellow in Medieval History at the Universita per Stranieri di Siena and adjunct professor at the Universita degli Studi di Milano. His work focuses on the political and socioeconomic history of the Italian city-states between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.
Elisabeth Malamut (University of Aix-Marseille)
Bio: Elisabeth Malamut est professeur émérite 4 l’Université d’ Aix-Marseille. Historienne de |’Empire byzantin, elle a consacré de nombreuses études aux relations politiques, diplomatiques et culturelles. Elle a publi¢é un ouvrage sur les iles de la Mer Egée du huitiéme au douziéme siécles, une synthése sur les pérégrinations des saints byzantins du quatri¢me au douziéme siécles, une biographie d’ Alexis Ier Comneéne.
Stephanie Novasio (University of Birmingham)
Bio: Stephanie Novasio is a final-year PhD candidate in Byzantine Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research examines representations of ageing and the Life Course in the later Byzantine period, with an emphasis on constructions of gender and the family.
Giulia M. Paoletti (University of Oxford)
Bio: Giulia M. Paoletti holds an M.St. in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. She was awarded an Ernst Mach Grant to work at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her work focuses on Byzantine poetry, monastic literature and more broadly on the Palaiologan period.
Annick Peters-Custot (University of Nantes) Bio: Annick Peters-Custot is Full Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes. After a PhD at the Sorbonne University (Paris I) on the Italo-Greek Communities in Post-Byzantine Italy and their acculturation process, she focuses her works on the transition in Southern Italy between the Byzantine period and the Norman domination in the socio-political, juridical, religious practices.
Nina Soleymani Majd (University of Grenoble Alpes)
Bio: Nina Soleymani Majd is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She received her PhD degree in 2019 from the Université Grenoble Alpes. Her dissertation is entitled “Doves and lionesses: Female characters in the Cycle of Guillaume d’Orange, the Digenis Akritis, and the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi’, and was awarded the Prix d’honneur 2020 de la Société Frangaise de Littérature Générale et Comparée.
Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues (University of Milan)
Bio: Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She is currently a Marie Sktodowska-Curie Fellow at the Universita di Milano Statale. She held research positions in the UK, Canada, and Italy. Her work focuses on the influence of Christian spirituality on the development of criminal justice in the late medieval Italian communes.
Acknowledgements
This book is the fruit of a project that started when the editors organised a conference with the same title as this volume, which was held at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on the 27th—28th of September 2019. The conference was made possible through the generous support of the Maison Francaise d’Oxford, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), Oxford Medieval Studies, the Royal Historical Society, and the CNRS-UMR Orient et Méditerranée. Vivien Prigent played a fundamental role in allowing us to use the beautiful rooms of the Maison Francaise d’Oxford as our venue, and we would like to thank him and all the staff of this institution for making the conference a success from an organisational point of view. We take the opportunity here to thank also all those who participated in the conference as speakers or as members of the audience, for having fostered a lively and truly international debate on the topic of discourses linking violence and femininity in the late-medieval Mediterranean. We felt like each one of the papers presented at the conference really added something to the discussion, and it was only for reasons of space and internal coherence of the book that the decision of publishing only part of them in this volume was taken.
We incurred a debt of gratitude towards even more people and institutions when we embarked in the process of publishing the proceedings. The team at Routledge, and our editors in particular, have been extremely professional and supportive, something that we especially appreciated as the preparation of this volume happened over the course of a global sanitary crisis, which obviously affected the lives and works of all the contributors to this volume. Support from the Past and Present Society was also fundamental to cover extra costs related to the publication. We were lucky enough to be able to count on the advice and encouragement of many brilliant academics who acted as readers, peer-reviewers or mentors to us while we were putting together this volume. We are grateful to Chris Wickham, Piroska Nagy, Daniel L. Smail, Trevor Dean, Benjamin Deruelle, Marc Lauxtermann, Andreas Rhoby, Gianluca Raccagni, Catherine Holmes, Alice Taylor, Olivier Delouis, Alex Vukovic, Oren Margolis, Elizabeth Robertson, Judith Herrin, Hannah Skoda, Gervase Rosser, Miri Rubin, John Drendel, Leonora Neville, John Arnold, and Michael Featherstone. Jonathan Krause has played a vital role as a proofreader, and has managed to work effectively with scholars coming from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The editors have, moreover, more personal debts of gratitude with friends and loved ones that have supported and advised them through the publication process. We would like to especially thank Roberta Berardi and Davide Massimo as supportive friends and scholars who already had experience with publishing collective volumes, and who provided much useful advice on the publication process.
Introduction
Medieval and modern gender-based violence
Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues, Lorenzo Caravaggi, and Giulia M. Paoletti
Several reasons stand behind the choice of analysing the theme of ‘Women and Violence in the late Medieval Mediterranean’ through an edited volume. The starting point is that the last decades have witnessed an increased interest in research concerning the relationship of women and violence in the Middle Ages, with new contributions focusing both on female criminality and violence on women. This engendered, therefore, a desire to contribute to the study of late medieval Mediterranean societies by bringing together the different strands of research on this topic, for which new methodological approaches rooted in the social sciences offer a compelling perspective. This study also aims to provide context for contemporary efforts towards social change regarding gender-based violence. The original conference from which this volume originates held at the Maison Francaise d’ Oxford on the 27th—28th of September 2019, was made possible through the generous support of Maison Francaise d’Oxford, TORCH, the Oxford Medieval Studies and CNRS-UMR Orient et Méditerranée. The proceedings we are hereby publishing represent a selection of the best papers delivered during the two-day conference. They cover a wide range of topics around assumptions concerning the links between women and violence in its full spectrum; that is to say, both violence committed against them and by them. In order to foster a wide-ranging discussion and facilitate a series of comparisons this volume covers a broad time span and geographic area, addressing late-medieval Mediterranean (1100-1500) across Latin Christendom, the Byzantine ‘commonwealth’ and the Islamicate world.
Medieval studies and gender-based violence: present outcomes and future perspectives
In the last few decades, the study of ‘medieval women’ has moved from an exclusive focus on family, marriage, sexuality, motherhood, chastity, and religious life towards new research horizons. In particular, gender historians have begun to investigate areas previously seen as dominated by males. Particular attention has been dedicated to work and economic activity. As has been demonstrated for many different late-medieval societies, women were employed in a variety of trades (although often in the lower end) and participated actively in local credit networks.!' Legal sources — and, in particular, judiciary documents — have turned out to be particularly well suited to the study of women’s everyday realities right across the socio-economic spectrum. As such, these judicial sources play a central role in most of this volume’s chapters. Many recent studies have pointed out that despite the subordination of women theorised in different legal systems, they were not always constrained by the law. On the contrary, women of different social classes engaged actively in judicial action in order to seek redress for causes ranging from civil matters to debt litigation, trespassing, and different forms of violence (for which, see below).? As Thomas Kuehn has put it, the ‘cultural expressions of misogyny (in contemporary treatises, laws, and other sources) seem almost a language of protest against the realities of the market and streets’ .? In turn, this has also led to an ongoing debate on the changing condition of women in the late-medieval and early-modern periods.*
More generally, these new approaches have been part of a growing understanding of medieval legal records not simply as prescriptive and descriptive sources of how society should function but, rather, as documents which make it possible to study social practices and the ways in which the law was understood, appropriated, and employed.° In turn, this has also contributed to the history of criminal justice — a vibrant field of study which developed in the course of the 1970s. In particular, the study of violence in medieval societies has recently been profoundly reconsidered. Until not too long ago, violence was perceived as a disruption of the social order guaranteed (at least in theory) by the rule of law and pursued by rising state apparatuses. The main narrative held that the propensity for violence of medieval people was a result of their inability to suppress their emotions.® In turn, historians held that the high levels of violence registered in medieval records (a result of quantitative and statistical approaches to the documentation — derived from contemporary sociological and criminological methods) resulted in inevitable social disruption, itself a consequence of the inefficacy and weakness of late-medieval governments.’ Such a negative view has been recently challenged thanks to the influence of legal and social anthropology on conflict studies in historical societies,’ and to a change of paradigm in the debate on the origins, rise, and development of the modern state. Socio-political and legal pluralism have been understood as characteristics of late-medieval polities for some time.’ Therefore, it has been recognised that conflict and violence were part of this multifaceted world, and were one of many different tools through which contemporaries defended and negotiated their status and power. Violence was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon, which was manifested in different ways and elicited different (and often discordant) social, legal, ethical, and religious reactions.'® These same studies have also pointed out that medieval societies were not irremediably violent and chaotic: conflict often followed a precise logic and was governed by a set of rules (whether normative or customary) which gave structure to political action and social relations.!'! Moreover, at least within Christian Europe, it has been pointed out that the pervasiveness of this ‘culture of violence’ was counterbalanced by an overwhelming desire for peace: this became particularly prominent from the thirteenth century onwards, thanks to a widespread religious reawakening and to the foundation of the Mendicant Orders, whose friars preached about the importance of reconciliation and forgiveness across Christendom.!? Hence, a growing number of studies have pointed out the central role of reconciliation within judicial systems. !*
Following these new historiographical trends, in the last few decades, an increasing number of studies have appeared on the relationship between women and violence in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Generally speaking, this has been mostly limited to the study of women as victims of domestic abuse and sexual assaults. Some of these studies have recently shown that while women were in a disadvantaged position, they could nonetheless use existing legal and ethical frameworks to their own advantage in order to seek redress.'* As mentioned, a similar argument has also been made for the use of the law courts more generally, as historians have pointed out that women had recourse to the courts for a variety of civil and criminal causes, such as theft, debt-litigation, trespassing, and other forms of judicial action.'> At the same time, other studies have shown that women also appeared as perpetrators of violence in a substantial number of cases, both against other women and against men.'° In turn, this has generated interest in the ways in which adjudicating authorities treated violent crimes committed by women — a more general aspect explored by feminist criminology from the 1970s onwards (discussed below). Some of the essays included in this collection contribute to this theme, and show how women under trial employed gendered categories of thought in order to defend their actions. Another aspect of conflict studies which has begun to be explored is the role of women in peacemaking, especially in Christian Europe.!”
Despite these studies, the analysis of the relationship between women and violence is still young, and there is ample room for research in a number of areas. For example, while it has been acknowledged that women participated actively in interpersonal violence, their role in feuds and vendettas — a key social practice in many Mediterranean ‘revenge societies’ — has been almost completely disregarded.'* Yet careful analysis of late-medieval court records has actually shown that (lower-class) women were often part of complex local networks of friendship and enmity which could lead to disputing and violent conflicts.!? Another theme which demands for further studies is the role of women in all aspects of warfare (from spurring menfolk to arms, to actual fighting, and mediation) — something which the present volume will contribute to directly.
Moreover, while in this period, the same (or similar) legal, ethical, medical, and religious gendered categorisations were shared across borders and different regions, as Patricia Skinner has remarked, women should not be analysed as a unitary and cohesive historical group.*° For example, as Teresa Phipps has recently noted in her study of women’s judicial activity in three different late-medieval English towns, there was no ‘typical’ in defining women’s experiences of the law. A similar argument could also be made for the engagement of women with violence (an area in which the law was a central — but, by no means, the only — element at play) in an area as diverse (although internally connected) as the Mediterranean. By offering a series of case studies ranging from Iberia to Constantinople, this collection fully upholds the need for comparative analysis, and will, therefore, make an important contribution to the field. This will be especially important as the majority of studies on this theme have focused on Christian Europe and have disregarded Byzantium and, in particular, the Islamic world. More generally, the theme of conflict and violence in the Islamic world has received less historiographical attention.
Finally, while as has been remarked, in the last few decades, the thorough analysis of court and other legal records have been an excellent source for the study of violence (and its gendered connotations), these are by no means the only available documents for the study of a theme as rich, multifaceted, and complex as that of the relationship between women and violence. Poems, chronicles, treatises, medical compendia, and other literary and intellectual texts were often, but not always, written by men and are therefore more removed from the ‘original voices’ of women (although one should be wary of the extent to which judicial documents can be trusted in that regard). Nevertheless, these still offer a precious contribution, as they may reveal patriarchal expectations of women’s behaviour, which may then be compared to the reality which emerges from other categories of documentation, and which may then be studied in a transnational and diachronic framework.
Recent decades have also seen an increase of gender studies in Byzantine scholarship, a topic that was previously overlooked. In the words of Herrin, ‘early studies ignored women unless they caught the attention of chroniclers, usually for inappropriate behaviour’.”! This lack of interest in gender studies was justified by Herrin by arguing that devotion to the classical word impaired the view on what follows, which was therefore seen as just a ‘dark medieval age’. This might be partly true; yet another problem relies on the lack of primary sources on the topic, which, when they exist, were written by men. Besides Herrin’s works, which gave the impetus to these studies — e.g. the ESF project: Gender and Religion — few other scholars turned their attention to gender issues in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.”* However, in these works the topic of violence is rarely touched upon. Dossey’s informative paper draws attention to the different attitude towards violence against women in the Eastern and Roman Empire, by pointing out that domestic violence was not only widely accepted in Imperial Rome but also somehow praised,”* whilst in the Justinian era we witness lenient penalties for men’s perpetration of violence. What caused much confusion in dealing with matters such as rape, adultery, and sexual offences, is the fact that for early Roman Law, sexual crimes were equally condemned, with no distinction between the gravity of such crimes —which is to say, rape was equalled to adultery. Things slightly changed in the later Empire, yet women still seem to be widely objectified, with the ultimate aim of enabling forceful violence.”
‘Men ought to act like good men, and women like good women’.*° To defend themselves, to prevent sexual crimes from happening or to avenge themselves, women had to ‘become men’ (G.v6piCopat).?’ In our understanding of women rights and role in Byzantine society, historiography is of little or no avail: most of the sources are written from a masculine perspective, therefore significantly impairing our judgement. Procopius’ description of Theodora is a good example: she is described in light of her covetousness (e.g. Procopius’ description of Theodora), her cunningness, her doubted morality. Yet again, as Brubaker argues, his invective ‘is not directed at the woman it slanders but rather challenged through her against a powerful male’.”® In contrast with this, hagiographical writings offer a different perspective, depicting extremely strong women, ‘brave enough’ to leave or escape from abusive men.”° Even so, the ‘traditional’ Byzantine view of women can be easily detected between the lines. A thorough discussion of women in hagiographical writings, with a strong focus on sexual crimes is offered by Betancourt.*°
We hardly have any evidence relating to Byzantine trials or juridical issues, and even less material on violence perpetrated by and against women. While violence in Byzantium is a topic explored by a few scholars,*! there is no thorough study that expressly addresses women and violence. The influence that women exercised in Byzantium, however, was unusually significant, compared to early Medieval Europe and the rising Islamic state.*”
There are, as of yet, no comparative studies between the Byzantine world and the Islamic state regarding violence and women. It seems that, just as in Imperial Rome, violence on women was an accepted social norm in Medieval Europe,** and the same holds true for the Islamic State. The Quran allows husbands to beat their wives to punish or educate them, while also warning men not to abuse their power. For the same reason, husbands could divorce women at their will, though it seems divorces were rarely a one-sided thing.** There are several notable works on women’s role in the Islamic State;*> there are hardly any on women and violence. Gendered studies generally focus on their role inside the family, and their economic activities.
In many of the works on gender-based violence in medieval societies, there is a clear echo of the renewed debate on the value of historical studies in better understanding, and addressing, contemporary issues. This discussion has deep roots in modern historiography,*° but the state of academic research after the 2008 economic crisis seems to have intensified the need for historians, especially those who work on the distant past, to justify their research efforts. Generally speaking, arguments justifying historical research have not hinged on claims of their profitability or contribution to economic innovation, but rather privilege the ‘relevance’>’ of historical studies in discussions about current scientific and social issues. A number of avenues to enhance this relevance have been highlighted by recent studies. Scholars have reconsidered the nature of the relationship between past and present. They have generally concluded that ‘a total disconnect between two historically connected cultures’ is rarely possible,** but also that the past has enough fundamental differences with the present to rarely be able to offer readily applicable solutions to modern issues. They have therefore proposed the identification of structural analogies or ruptures between historical periods as a means to highlight the culturally constructed nature of customs and institutions. Others have pleaded for the necessity of an histoire engagée that gives voice to past marginalised communities in order to promote a higher level of emancipation in society.” Some proposals, additionally, have focussed on what medieval studies has specifically to offer compared to the study of other past eras. The particularly ‘alien qualities’ often attributed to the Middle Ages compared to antiquity or modernity, for instance, could be used by researchers and their audiences to stimulate the ability to imagine positive alternatives to current practices and attitudes.*° The distance in time between us and the Middle Ages could also promote an analysis of long-term social dynamics, in contrast with a modernity that is obsessively focused on short-term perspectives.*!
Ultimately, the most solid proposals springing from this transnational discussion have in common their call for a rapprochement of history and the social sciences, following an approach rooted in the legacy of the Annales school.” Historical research might indeed benefit not just from a close dialogue with the social sciences, but more specifically from reconfiguring history as a social science itself, one that centres on diachronic processes:* or, as Bloch proposed, ‘la science des hommes dans le temps’.*+ An example of the value of such an approach for the study of gendered violence in the Middle Ages is Kienzle and Nienhuis’ work examining the medieval origins of certain cultural and religious beliefs that serve to excuse violence against women, and work against survivors’ attempts to find safety in contemporary societies. Their volume effectively combined the study of medieval history and feminist approaches to criminology, social sciences, and theology in order to contribute to providing more context for contemporary effort towards social change. Research of this type can not only advance historical knowledge, but also respond to requests from social science researchers for an increased dialogue with history and historians on topics such as gendered violence, with the aim of providing more multi-layered readings of the phenomenon.*° History, as demonstrated by these requests and by the works that respond to them, can not only fruitfully tap into the methodology of other disciplines to produce relevant knowledge, but can also feed those disciplines back by providing them with equally useful new concepts, theorisations, and analytical tools.
Our approach and methodology
This book follows this path of rapprochement and knowledge exchange by adopting an analytical framework that incorporates methodological suggestions from two theoretical traditions of the social sciences in particular. The first is feminist criminology, especially in its intersectional variety. This approach was born in the 1970s with the aim of shedding light on the heavily gendered nature of contemporary scholarly reflections about violence and violent crimes, which were conceptualised as essentially masculine behaviours.*’ Feminist criminology has highlighted differences in both offense and victimisation between men and women.** In particular, the strong association of women with victimhood in modern Western society makes it harder to conceive of them as criminals, so that the phenomenon of female crime is often labelled as peripheral. This phenomenon partially explains persistent sentencing disparities in favour of female defendants.*? At the same time, however, the most egregious female offenders are seen as having failed to uphold societal standards of proper femininity, which include passivity, subservience, and purity, so that their actions are often stigmatised and punished more harshly than those of men’s.*°
The paradoxical way in which women are treated by existing justice systems calls for an analysis of the gendered nature of both offending and victimisation. This collection addresses the need for a gendered analysis of justice by exploring the relationship of women to violence across its full spectrum, including both violence committed against women and violence perpetrated by women themselves. These two phenomena are deeply interwoven. Female offenders are often perceived first of all as victims, due to how frequently these women have histories of abuse compared to male counterparts. This is borne out across a significant number of studies.*! Besides this, the rationale for the broad-based approach of this book lies in the wider suggestion of feminist social sciences that victimization and criminality are often gendered on the basis of the same assumptions, which therefore need to be studied in all the contexts of their existence for their role to be fully understood in present as well as in past societies.*” Since, however, women’s experiences are different on account of their social class, religion, ethnicity, and other identity markers than gender alone, the insights of intersectional feminism will be taken into account in this collection. The complex ways in which various identity markers interact with gender in the shaping of assumptions linking femininity and violence will therefore play a prominent role in the papers constituting this work, as well as in its overarching structure.
The second theoretical tradition incorporated in the framework of this book is a combination of constructionism and interactionism. These approaches highlight the role of social interactions and communication between members of a given community in creating shared assumptions about reality. These findings are relevant for the study of violence and violent crime in a number of ways. First of all, they underline how societal ideas about what violence is, and what can be considered as violent, are shaped by the interaction (face-to-face or through any type of media) between a society’s members.*4 Every society thus produces different discourses on violence, which give different meanings to the concept and constitute overarching argumentative frameworks for talking about it. Researchers have proposed that members of societies also assign different roles, or labels,*° to people in relationship to violence, so that certain social categories become considered as more or less inclined to commit violence. This categorisation informs, and is informed by, societal perceptions around legitimate and illegitimate violence. Law and social policy, therefore, are closely tied to these discourses, and social scientists have often underlined the large role that assumptions based on gender play in their shaping.’ The reconstruction of the history of labels and assumptions linking women to violence in the past, and their relationship with those labels and assumptions that persist today, is exactly one of the areas in which criminologists, sociologists and feminist theorists have asked for the collaboration of historians.
This volume responds to the call for more interdisciplinary work by focusing precisely on the above assumptions and the discourses they belong to. It aims to reconstruct what situations the inhabitants of the late medieval Mediterranean saw as typical /oci to observe the relationship between women and violence in their society; how women who found themselves in these situations were labelled; and in particular whether they were seen as victims, offenders, legitimate users of violence or a combination of these three possibilities. In order for this aim to be achieved, the contributions in this book share a common definition of violence stemming from an emic perspective, that is, all forms of physical attack to the integrity of the body and of verbal attack to an individual’s reputation.** It is the conviction of the editors that concepts such as ‘social discourse’ and ‘assumption’ can be particularly conducive to advancing our knowledge on the relationship between violence, thus defined, and medieval Mediterranean women.*? Discourses are sets of representations, statements, or assumptions (as they will be defined throughout this book), which together produce a particular version of a phenomenon. Not all aspects of the constructionist concept of discourse, however, will be maintained here. For example, the idea that the things people do or say can never be a function of their individual opinions or personalities, but always a manifestation of societal discourses will be rejected.°! A strength of this methodological tool is, however, the intimate connection of discourses to the socio-economic (and legal, we would add) reality in which they emerge, as well as their fundamental implications for the promotion of different policies dealing with issues of gendered violence.® Positing the existence of some predominant discourses on women and violence in the late medieval Mediterranean, therefore, requires researchers to never lose track of the socioeconomic and legal positions of women in the societies considered here, thus avoiding the risk of seeing culture as abstracted from the conditions of lived experience in a given community.
The geographical and chronological focus of this volume is the Mediterranean and its surrounding territories and polities in the late medieval period (c. 11001500). The use of these two terms — Mediterranean and late Middle Ages — require some conceptual clarifications. While the Mediterranean Sea has long played a part in the historical, literary, and geographical imagination of the peoples who inhabit this region, in the second half of the twentieth century, its use as a category of historical analysis has raised criticism, in part because of its artificiality and some conceptual links with European imperialism.** Thanks, however, to the global turn of recent years, the Mediterranean has, once again, become an area deemed worthy of historical, sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic study. As many studies have pointed out, this region — whose boundaries are only loosely defined and subjected to continuous contraction and expansion — has been characterised by a remarkable degree of connectivity and exchange, making it an ideal case study for comparative research.® In turn, the idea that seas (or deserts) acted not as dividers, but as connecting points for transnational networks may also be applied to other world regions, thereby challenging the idea that the Mediterranean was exceptional.
This interconnectivity was not only limited to economic interactions and the circulation of goods masterminded by merchant-bankers, but also included the spreading, reception, and retransformation of medical, philosophical, and legal thought and ideas across geographical, cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries.°”? Contact and exchange were the consequence of commercial and cooperative relationships between different polities and cultures, but also of conflict and warfare. Two developments which were particularly important for gendered categorisations of violence in many different regions of the Mediterranean were the progressive rediscovery and systematisation of Roman law at Bologna and other important Studia from the twelfth century onwards;®* and the translation and circulation of Galenic medical thought by intellectuals such as Avicenna and Averroes, whose works were circulated around Western Europe from the late twelfth and thirteenth century onwards. One of the aims of this book is to see how similar ideas were transformed and negotiated throughout the Mediterranean basin. In turn, therefore, the structure and themes of this volume will also be useful to global historians of the middle ages and beyond. Indeed, the contributions have here been grouped together thematically, and not geographically or chronologically, in order to encourage a broad reading across the region, following an approach employed in recent studies.’ In addition, some contributions — such as, in particular, the discussion of warlike women in epics by Nina Soleymani Majd — have adopted a ‘combinative’ (and not merely comparative) perspective, bringing into dialogue French, Byzantine, and Persian literature.
By focusing on a broad geographical area, the present book does not intend to determine whether the Mediterranean was a singular and coherent socio-cultural space’! — although the contribution included here will indirectly serve to engage with this ongoing debate. Nor do we intend to present the Mediterranean as a static and ‘timeless’ area. On the contrary, between the thirteenth and sixteenth century, the geopolitical landscape of this vast area experienced enormous changes and deep transformations. The most obvious was the demise of the Eastern Roman Empire (or Byzantium). If shortly before the beginning of the period under analysis here, this was arguably the most powerful and sophisticated polity of this part of the world. Byzantium necessarily played a major role in Mediterranean societies, cultures and history that outlived the empire itself; many of its structures and institutions were upheld and reused by the Ottomans. Therefore, the present volume will also account for diachronic change, both within the same polities and across this region. For example, the essay by Philippa Byrne will show how the legislation on women in Sicily — an island at the heart of the Mediterranean with a complex and stratified history — underwent important changes from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries. The period between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries was, more generally, one of huge social, legal, political, and intellectual transformations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Since no single part of the Mediterranean world achieved hegemonic status over the others — as has also been observed for the global Middle Ages more generally” — this geographical and chronological framework will serve as an ideal case study for the analysis of a topic as rich, complex, and diverse as the relationship between women and violence. As a final caveat, our choice to employ the term ‘medieval’ arises from convention, but is not aimed at imposing an Eurocentric model over the rest of this vast and diverse region.’? While a substantial part of this volume covers more traditional western European areas (even if discussing a topic which, as has been explained, has received little historiographical attention until very recently), we have made a serious effort to include contributions on women and violence in Byzantium and beyond.
Women and violence in the medieval Mediterranean: questions of relevance
The Middle Ages emerge in this volume as an indispensable link in the long-term social dynamics of gendered violence in Mediterranean area, a link that cannot be ignored to understand later developments. In the period analysed here, we see deeply embedded assumptions surrounding women and violence that have parallels with the present day. Soleymani Majd and Lau underline the ambiguous treatment of female users of violence in a variety of Mediterranean societies, although their contributions, as well as Malamut’s, point to a greater openness to recognising their agency in the Byzantine and Islamicate world in comparison with Latin Europe. As other scholars have also pointed out,” thus, violent women in the Medieval Mediterranean could be seen as egregious offenders and be treated with particular harshness, just like nowadays. This similarity in some of these assumptions across the centuries is obviously not to suggest that they are ‘natural’ or permanent. Our contributions show how, much to the contrary, they were rooted in religious beliefs, and political configurations or family structures that emerged or evolved in the Middle Ages and had an important role in shaping Mediterranean societies in the /ongue durée. It is exactly because of the contingent character of these assumptions that medieval women in the Mediterranean could employ their knowledge of the structures of their own society to adapt them and make space for their own agency.
The fact that groups oppressed on the basis of their sex, ethnicity, or social class were also able to express their agency in past societies is not a new finding. In particular, the fact that, contrary to stereotypes, women are not victims by nature, and never have been, has been reaffirmed by recent works focusing on women’s agency in pre-modern society.” This collection reflects this important result, while at the same time cautioning researchers against interpreting it as a way of invalidating the weight of deep-rooted assumptions on women and violence in the past and in the present. The potential risk of such an approach, we believe, is that of transforming gendered violence in an individual issue instead of a political one.
Moreover, this volume also aims to go beyond a discussion of women’s agency by reflecting more broadly on the discourses linking violence and femininity. Our contributions shed light on significant differences in modern and medieval assumptions underpinning these discourses: the role of Corsican aristocratic women in practices of vendetta described in Arrighi’s contribution, and the framing of abortion and infanticide as not-exclusively feminine crimes in Byzantium underlined by Novasio, both point in this direction. This volume depicts therefore a complex landscape of differences and similarities in past and present discourses on women and violence. This highlights how their development is not a straightforward and irresistible process. Assumptions shared by several societies can at any point take different directions in each of them, as well as disappearing completely or resurfacing at later stages.”° Parallels with the construction, maintenance and collapse of discourses of authority are clearly noticeable;”’ something which is unsurprising, since having one’s use of violence recognised as legitimate is often a fundamental component in establishing one’s authority.’* In this book, therefore, assumptions connecting women and violence are analysed in parallel with other social constructions that gave authority to certain groups and denied it to others. In particular, this means forms of authority connected to the legitimate use of violence, such as the famous high-medieval distinction of society into three orders: Fighters (aristocrats whom maintained a monopoly on the use of force), Prayers (members of religious orders), and Workers (generally agricultural workers). Authority was indeed not just based on gender, but also, importantly, on socioeconomic and political differentiations. As a number of papers in this collection highlight, social class could be more important than gender in determining what was considered as an individual’s appropriate relationship to violence.
The ebb and flow in discourses on women and violence highlighted above is thus firmly placed within the social context in which women lived and within the social structures in which they were embedded, in primis the most pervasive ones, such as the family, the religious community and the political institutions. This highlights how the roles considered appropriate for women in relationship to violence were often connected to their functions within the structures of late medieval Mediterranean societies.” The political, economic, and cultural exchanges between the different shores of the Mediterranean Sea could thus create linkages in both social practices and discourses on women and violence.
In sum, this work will be relevant in promoting efforts towards social change in a number of ways. Firstly, it historicises and denaturalises narratives we take for granted, by shedding more light on the origins and implications of assumptions connecting women and violence that gained a prominent place in the late medieval Mediterranean and are still at work in present discourses. Most importantly, it offers methodological reflections on the importance of considering the longterm dynamics in the development, transformation, and collapse of discourses of gendered violence, as well as on the fundamental connection between the latter and the socioeconomic and political contexts in which they operate. We hope that these reflections, which have not always been at the forefront in studies of gendered violence, can prompt other scholars working on these issues to ask new questions to their case-studies.
Themes and findings
The volume is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the relationship between women and war, seen through the analysis of primary sources. In the first paper, Maximilian Lau offers a thorough analysis of a unique and previously untranslated Byzantine court poem by Theodore Prodromos, describing the defence of Turkish-held Gangra by its Amira in 1135. The chapter analyses the poem by applying perspectives from gender studies, to describe the portrayal of women and outsiders at the Byzantine court. It finds that the poem offers a different perspective on the role of Muslim women, who in this case carried out the typically male role of organising the military defences of Gangra. This is followed by Nina Soleymani Majd’s paper, which studies the representations of feminine forms of violence within the genre of the epic across three different linguistic areas (Byzantine, Persian and French), through the lens each region’s epic cycle. The contributor explored how attitudes towards women in epic texts could be positive or negative, and in so doing, offers a critique of the epic genre more broadly. This criticism, in particular, focuses on the genre’s gender binarism. While in the poems the specific deeds of women are concealed to the point of obscurity, their violent nature as warriors remains a key theme of epic writing. In the third paper, Alberto Luongo examines figures and episodes about the relationship between women and warfare in twelfth-thirteenth century communal Italy. The chapter notably focuses on middle-class women, who are typically overlooked in scholarship, which tends to focus exclusively on elite women. In this respect, the author concludes that there was indeed an active participation of women in the warfare of the Italian communes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the presumed exceptionality of middle-class women in warfare should be reconsidered more broadly. Lucie Arrighi’s contribution concludes the section by discussing the role of female revenge in the plot of the most ancient history of Corsica. By reassessing the roots of the topos that sees Corsica as a violent land, the author discusses the duplex role played by women in war and politics in the insular seigniorial discourse of the fifteenth century. Besides offering a thorough study on a less-wellknown topic, the author suggests that on one hand female violence was seen as a consequence of the political turmoil that the Corsicans were responsible for, while on the other women also acted as the indispensable guarantors of the traditional Corsican model of lordship.
The second section (Women and Criminal Courts) is opened by Carol Lansing’s paper in which she focuses on late thirteenth-century courtroom records on cases of rape from Bologna. The author engages with the existence of a surprisingly large number of trials for this crime, despite the widespread scholarly opinion on rape according to which both the victims and their families tended not to pursue rapists in court for fear of affecting the women’s reputation. This chapter establishes that almost 50 percent of accusations concerned women without a husband or a father, individuals who would frequently oppose the revelation of such crimes to authorities. The following chapter, by Nina KrSljanin, offers an analysis of crime regulation in fourteenth-century Serbia, during the reign of the Emperor (Tsar) Stefan Duan, by investigating similarities and differences between legal codes regulating the crime of rape in the Mediterranean. The author seeks to understand if similarities are the result of trans-Mediterranean cultural influences or a mere coincidence. She concludes that the Serbian regulation of sex crimes relied on Roman and Byzantine law, but given the differences between rural and urban environments, there were contradictions between the laws present in the statues and their enforcement. The next author, Philippa Byrne, sheds light on the legal status and punishment of women in a previously understudied period of Sicilian history, that of transition from Norman rule to the establishment of Staufen. She compares the terms of crime regulation between the Assizes of Roger II and the Constitutions of Frederick II, to see if the aforementioned transition should be read as a transformation in the status of women in Sicilian politics.
The last section, Violence and Female Social Roles, opens with Elisabeth Malamut’s paper, which applies Michel Foucault’s theories of parrésia to Byzantine society by looking at how it was conceived and what it represented. She analyses both the non-gendered parreésia of saints and a gendered version, seen as the specific type of violence allowed to women in Byzantium. In the following contribution, Loek Luiten analyses the condition of slaves in Renaissance Central Italy by looking at a record of the life of a slave called Jacoba. By analysing a handful of cases, Luiten concludes by arguing that, in some cases female solidarity could transcend barriers between women of different social classes, and even between free and unfree. The contribution by Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm offers a discussion of several criminal inquests from the mid-fourteenth century Fiorentino, in order to explain when and why elite women instigated violence against non-elite individuals. Through a detailed analysis of such cases the author argues that there was a continuum between slander and delegated violence, during and after the plague cycles of the years 1348-1349 and 1363-1364, when women allegedly replaced their male kinsmen as instigator of assaults. This finding goes against usual assumptions about the lack of female agency in situations of factional violence. The last paper, by Stephanie Novasio, focuses on crimes such as abortion, infanticide, exposure and child neglect in Byzantium, to see if there was any gendered bias regarding such crimes; that is to say if they were only perceived as typically feminine crimes by the Byzantines. She concludes that these crimes offered an avenue for violence open to people of multiple stations and genders, so long as they inverted the social standards of both.
Annick Peter-Custot concludes the volume by summing up the main findings brought up by the contributions offered in the book. In particular, she analyses the theoretical framework in which violence and women were correlated in the late medieval Mediterranean. Although the framework was elaborated on the basis of sources written by men, this volume offers, on the other hand, a different perspective on the relationship between women and violence, in which their agency to manipulate the framework is recognised.
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