a member of the minor nobility in the region around the northern Catalan city of Girona, was called to appear before the veguer and his official judge to answer charges against her. The documents do not specify the exact nature of her offense, except to say that she had violated the statutes of the Peace and Truce, but it likely involved one or more of the substantial debts that she had accumulated. An agreement for one of these, dated December 29, 1299, and bound together with the charges of the Peace and Truce violations, showed that she had convinced Bernat de Petra and Jaume de Bertilio, partners in a Girona cloth mercantile, to extend her credit in the substantial sum of 759 sous for unspecified fabric for her own use and that of her household. In exchange for this credit, she offered up eighteen “hostages”—that is, people to stand surety for her should she default. Finally, she stipulated that she would not ask for any extensions on the debt, nor would she leave the district of Girona until the debt was paid.1
This final provision was the subject of the 1303 hearing that brought Ermessenda’s case into the registers of the chancery of the Crown of Aragon. At that time, it was not Ermessenda de Cabrenys who appeared in the veguer’s court but Berenguer de Devesia, a trained lawyer acting as her procurator and official legal representative. Reaching back to provisions contained in the sixth-century Code of Justinian, Berenguer argued that because his client was a materfamilias—a term of ancient Roman origin that comprehended both sex and status but not motherhood per se2—it was inappropriate for the veguer to compel her to mix with “crowds of men” at the law courts. She was, according to her procurator, prepared to pay the fine or fee (pignora) demanded by the veguer, but would only do so in person at her primary residence in Cartells, or in the town of Santa Eugenia—significantly, both places under her direct jurisdiction, rather than that of the veguer. If the veguer wanted the pignora paid in the city of Girona itself, she had authorized her procurator to do so in her name but refused to appear personally in court, as to do so would be an affront to her status as a materfamilias.3 Berenguer went on to cite another passage from Roman law, this time from the fifth-century Theodosian Code, to support his position,4 and even offered to pay the expenses of the officials who might be sent to collect the debt. His stated concern was not the payment itself but the impropriety of his client’s being forced to leave her own home to answer a charge in public.5
People in modern Western societies have become used to thinking about the law as something that sets limits to protect individuals and groups from harm and that offers redress when harm occurs. But as the story of Ermessenda de Cabrenys illustrates, the boundaries for acceptable behavior that law and legal systems lay down shape not only an individual’s day-to-day behavior but also his or her sense of where he or she fits into the particular culture that he or she is a part of. Laws can reflect a society’s real standards for behavior, or they may express a cultural ideal, but either way, the subtle cultural framework that they construct may be as influential—if not more so—than the more obvious restrictions on an individual’s behavior.
Gender systems are one of the more pervasive frameworks that the law has had a hand in constructing. Nevertheless, though gender is intertwined with legal culture, the relationship between the two is mutable, either as a product of a given society’s internal legal developments or as a response to external challenges. In order to understand the way that the law and gender interact, though, it is not sufficient to look merely at any society’s legal system in isolation. Laws and legal systems are not born ex nihilo, but rather are the product of sometimes centuries of legal development, often incorporating elements of numerous older systems. The law and legal culture of the later medieval Crown of Aragon are good examples of this tendency. Secular law borrowed from Germanic, Roman, and ecclesiastical legal traditions and assimilated portions of the value systems—including ideas about gender—that shaped those legal cultures.
The fact that the Crown of Aragon was a federated monarchy, composed of several smaller territorial units, each with its own law, presents both challenges and opportunities for historians interested in the formation of women’s legal identity. The multiple and often overlapping jurisdictions and legal systems of the Crown of Aragon, while complex, also allow us to make some more generalized statements about women’s legal identity that a geographic territory with a more unified system might not. The first half of this chapter outlines the legal landscape in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon, focusing on how the medieval reception of the Roman and canon law of the ius commune added a unifying element to a disparate legal landscape, in the process contributing to the construction of a multilayered legal identity for women. It would, however, be a mistake to grant sole agency to a depersonalized legal movement. Law only works in conjunction with the individuals and societies who adopt, interpret, and use it. Accordingly, the second half of this chapter moves from the realm of substantive law to consider procedural law, arguing that the gender system laid out in the formal legal framework, while important, was also negotiable, and illustrating the legal mechanisms by which women and their families, friends, enemies, and neighbors could interact with and influence the legal discourse that shaped women’s lives in the later Middle Ages.
The Legal Landscape
The legal environment of the Crown of Aragon in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was the product not just of internal developments but also of important relations with its neighbors, beginning even before the twelfth-century dynastic union between the counts of Barcelona and the royal house of Aragon.6 The first, and arguably oldest, influence on the development of Catalano-Aragonese history was the relationship between the Catalan counties to the south of the Pyrenees and the Occitan counties to the north. The connection between these two regions originated with the Carolingian conquests of the late eighth and early ninth centuries7 and persisted long after the Catalan counts became independent rulers of their own territories in the tenth, sharing linguistic, legal, and institutional patterns that differed from the surrounding regions, and crafting marital alliances that maintained the political connection between the two.8 The importance of the link between these territories might be best exemplified by the reign of King Pere I (r. 1196–1213), whose political and marital alliances with Toulouse and Montpellier eventually led to his death in the Albigensian crusades at the battle of Muret (1213). According to Thomas Bisson, Pere’s death marked the end of “Catalan dreams of … possibly uniting the people of Catalonia, Provence, and Languedoc.”9 Less than fifty years later, Jaume I (r. 1213–76) had ceded to the French king Louis IX claim to all territory north of the Pyrenees, except the county of Rousillon and the lordship of Montpellier, both of which would eventually pass to the Catalan kings of Mallorca.10 By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Crown’s ties with the southern French principalities had not been extinguished—Jaume II (r. 1291–1327) would marry women of two different southern French aristocratic houses11—but the trans-Pyrenean relationship in the later Middle Ages was no longer as important as it once had been. Nevertheless, the connections between the two regions persisted in the realm of intellectual developments, especially in the field of law, as the legal faculty of Montpellier brought scholars from the Crown of Aragon into close contact with their counterparts from the Midi.
At the same time that the Crown’s territorial claims north of the Pyrenees were declining, political relations with the neighboring kingdom of Castile began to take on greater import. The two kingdoms had been sometime allies in the reconquest of the peninsula throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, most notably in 1212 when Pere I, as an ally of the Castilian king Alfonso VIII, played an important role in defeating the Almohads at the pivotal battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.12 But the ongoing reconquest of the peninsula also gave rise to rivalries between the two kingdoms: Jaume I’s conquest of Valencia was to plunge him into conflict with Castile’s Alfonso X, eventually leading him to give up the southern portions of that conquest to his Castilian neighbor. The decades covered in the present volume marked a brief period of peace between the two kingdoms, bookended by the struggle over southern Valencia in the late thirteenth century and war between Pere III and the kings of Castile from 1356 to 1375.13
Thus, the last decades
