Medieval Women and Urban Justice

As this fine contribution to Manchester University Press’s Gender in History series demonstrates, urban court records offer an ‘unparalleled insight’ not only into ordinary women’s active experience of the law in medieval England, but also into ‘their lives, interactions and relationships’ (p. 1). Teresa Phipps draws on the surviving legal records of three contrasting urban communities, Winchester, Chester and Nottingham, to explore women’s engagement with, and identities within, the institutions of local justice over two centuries. Chosen on the basis that they were not as large or important as York, Bristol or Norwich (other locations with a good run of borough court rolls), these three cities offer appropriate comparisons by being geographically diverse and having distinct political and social contexts. Women’s access to local justice is explored through focus cases involving commercial transactions and debt litigation, regulation of the trade environment, interpersonal offences and public order misbehaviour. To provide a

Archaeology · Criminology · Economic Justice · Political science · Sociology · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History