had abandoned her and their daughter and had maliciously refused to support either of them financially; she was, therefore, suing her husband for the financial support owed her.1 Pere, the batlle of the Catalan town of Borredà, lodged a counter-complaint that his wife was a notorious adulteress—a circumstance that would have legally absolved him of any obligation to either her or her daughter. As far as Pere was concerned, his wife had forfeited any claim on the financial support to which her dowry should have entitled her, and she and her child were on their own.2
This chapter will focus on the gendered relationship between women’s economic position and the law. Unlike the much-studied phenomenon of the medieval English common law’s feme covert (an adult woman whose legal personality was “covered” by her spouse),3 women in the Crown of Aragon maintained legal personalities distinct from those of their husbands, fathers, and other male relatives. This does not mean, however, that they were equal in the eyes of the law. In the area of property in particular, the romanizing law codes of the later medieval Crown of Aragon assumed a distinctly unequal relationship between men and women, with all economic decisions being made by the male head of household. This particular assumption is implicit in all written law about women’s property rights and, as such, colored the existence of medieval women.
Questions surrounding women’s access to and control of property in the Middle Ages have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship, generally undertaken with a view to describing the social effects of gendered property law.4 This chapter asks a slightly different set of questions, revolving around the legal assumptions that underpinned both laws and litigation and the way that shifts in these underlying assumptions produced changes in women’s ability to control their economic lives. Beginning with a survey of law codes from throughout the Crown of Aragon and samples of dotal contracts from judicial districts around the northwestern Mediterranean, I will briefly outline the way that this particular society conceived of women’s relationship to their dotal properties. Having established the economic landscape of the later medieval household as background, the core of this chapter will examine litigation between women and their husbands or husbands’ families regarding dotal properties, the outcome of which often depended upon conflicting interpretations of legal principles that had been developed more than a millennium earlier during the time of the Roman Empire. Women’s property litigation reveals an internal contradiction in Catalano-Aragonese law, which sought simultaneously to protect women’s property rights and to enforce a patriarchal household structure that gave the male head of household full administrative rights over and responsibilities for the family economy. An investigation of the ways in which jurists, family members, and women themselves negotiated between these two imperatives not only adds to our understanding of women’s historical relationship to property law, but also shows how women adjusted their litigation strategies to engage with the gendered assumptions that underpinned those laws. More specifically, we find both widows and married women representing themselves in court in terms of an inherent female vulnerability and dependency that the purpose and outcome of their own litigation belie.
Dowry: Law and Practice
Called the ajuar in Aragon, axuar in Catalonia, and exovar in Valencia, dowry in the Crown of Aragon (as in the rest of medieval Europe) consisted of the property that a woman’s family of origin bestowed on her at the time of her marriage.5 Legally, dowry could consist of either moveable or immovable goods, though in practice cash dowries dominated during this period. In a survey of fifteen dotal instruments preserved in the municipal archive of Girona during the reign of Jaume II, dowries ranged from 200 sous (for a marriage between a baker’s daughter and a shoemaker)6 to 3,000 sous plus a significant trousseau (for a marriage between two families of the local minor aristocracy).7 Discounting these two as outliers, far from the mean, the average dowry of the remaining thirteen couples was 680.8 sous, with the amount remaining relatively stable over the course of nearly four decades.8 This amount does not include the unspecified values of the trousseaus included in most of these contracts—these typically included one or two dresses (one contract specified that the woman’s trousseau included two dresses, made of materials valued at 20 and 15 sous respectively9), bedding, and often a chest “with its contents”—presumably some or all of the woman’s personal or household goods.10 While the Girona sample is small, its figures roughly align with those found in other territories in the Crown of Aragon around the same time: dowries in the lower Llobregat region just southwest of Barcelona averaged 48.2 lliures (964 sous) for the period between 1321 and 1330, and 43.6 lliures (872 sous) for the fourteenth century as a whole.11 Half a century earlier, dowries of artisan women in the town of Perpignan averaged 500 sous.12 Even over a century later, during the much-studied period of dowry inflation,13 figures in the region were not much higher: in fifteenth-century Valencia, artisan dowries clustered around 800–1,200 sous, while the dowries of women from laboring families were predominantly valued at between 400 and 800 sous.14
Less common, but important to consider nonetheless, were commonproperty marriages. Variously known as germania, farascha, or matrimonio mig per mig, these were marriages in which all marital assets were shared equally, and neither party had responsibility for the other’s debts. At the death of one spouse, the surviving partner would be left with their half of the marital property but with no claim on any of their deceased spouse’s share.15 The Code of Tortosa makes provisions for such unions,16 as do the thirteenth-century Costums of the Vall d’Aran, which stipulate community of both marital goods and capital gains, especially in cases of settling debts incurred by one partner.17 Valencian law also allowed for common-property marriage and provided for the merging of both property brought into the marriage at its inception and capital gains acquired during the course of the marriage.18 Historians have generally linked this type of marriage with couples of lower socioeconomic standing, an arrangement born of necessity rather than choice, either because a woman’s family was unable to afford a dowry, or because work among these classes was a collaborative endeavor, resulting in joint profits or losses that did not accord well with the separate property regime of a dotal marriage.19 But in her study of late thirteenth-century Perpignan, Rebecca Winer has argued convincingly against this set of assumptions, showing that women and men in mig per mig marriages came from a variety of economic levels. The one common characteristic was that the participants in this type of arrangement tended to be artisans, tradespeople, or sometimes “professionals” like physicians20—people whose wealth, in other words, came from their labor, rather than from landed income.
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