Women and Violence
If violence was laudable only when wielded by a figure of authority to preserve the social hierarchy, how did medieval society react when the tables were reversed? Stemming from the ideal that a man is king in his own household, English law categorised homicide of one's husband as petty treason.
The same classification applied when a clergyman killed his prelate, or a servant his master. The ius commune did not employ this derogatory label. However, the elements of rebellion and betrayal intrinsic to the crime ensured that courts everywhere treated such transgressions as more egregious than mere homicides. Both the church and the medical community expounded a view of women as inherently passive creatures. A physically violent woman was thus unnatural. For that reason, the law punished aggressive women more harshly than it did men. While courts normally sentenced male felons to hanging or decapitation, they condemned female felons to death by fire, drowning or burial alive. Women's remarkably low rate of participation in violent crimes implies that medieval perceptions were sensitive to a reality in gendered behaviours. The records indicate a preponderance of men. Carl Hammer's study of medieval Oxford sees a 6 per cent participation rate by women in homicides.[639] Barbara Hanawalt's study of fourteenth-century England offers a marginally higher figure, with women taking part in 7 per cent of felonious crimes (including non-violent felonies).[640] [641] In France, only 4 per cent of the petitions for royal pardons of serious crime originated with women. 19 Historians have provided two wholly incongruous explanations for the diminished involvement of women in violent crimes. First, the passivity expected of women worked to their benefit. Since medieval society deemed violence a masculine trait, homicide investigations regularly overlooked women associated with the victim as potential suspects. Accordingly, women's actual rates of participation in violent crime were probably much higher than is documented. Second, women are naturally less violent. Thus, violent crime in the Middle Ages, much as it is today, was primarily a masculine activity.Expectations of passivity had implications also for sexual violence against women. As Ruth Mazo Karras has observed, the medieval world envisioned sex as an act that a man performed on a woman. Linguistic usage underscored this construction of sex. While today we use intransitive verbs to indicate an act that two people engage in equally (‘to have sex', ‘to make love'), the medieval world instead employed transitive verbs to express sex as an act that a man (subject) does to a woman (object).[642] Because women were not expected to be active participants in sexual encounters, it was difficult to draw a firm line between consensual and non-consensual sex. From the perspective of a court, the experience remained essentially the same for a woman regardless of her consent. The matter of rape was complicated further by its Roman legacy as a property crime in which the woman's father was the victim. Accordingly, it was not usually the woman's permission that the law required, but that of her male guardian. Law in practice narrowed the scope of the crime even further by placing restrictions on the victim's marital status. In many places, a woman had to be a virgin to cry rape; at the very least, she had to be a woman of honourable reputation. Because a woman's voice carried little weight in the medieval courtroom, the courts expected rape accusations to be sued with the support of a male family member. In Castile, for example, the law permitted only men to initiate a suit; women could not sue their own rapists. As all of these conditions and limitations imply, the medieval courts were not eager to try rapists. Few men stood trial for rape; even fewer were punished. Edward Powell's study of the English Midlands over a thirty-year period in the fifteenth century produced 280 indictments of rape: none of them resulted in a conviction.[643] The records for both Nuremberg and Venice reveal similar results.[644] Much ink has been spilt on the subject of why so few rapists were convicted for their crimes.
The general consensus would seem to be that the penalties for rape were too strenuous. Medieval justice was founded on the premise of an ‘eye for an eye', and quite simply, judges and jurors did not see death as a fitting punishment for sexual violation. The dismissiveness of a patriarchal society towards sexual violence is encapsulated best in Andreas Capellanus' treatise on courtly love. The cynical chaplain gently reminds his noble reader that true love can exist only between those close in rank. Thus, the nobleman's feelings for the buxom peasant woman are not love but lust, and he should purge his desires by indulging in them whenever a ‘suitable spot' arises ‘by rough embraces'.[645]
More on the topic Women and Violence:
- Women and Violence
- Public Violence against Women
- Amestris' Revenge (I): Violence among Xerxes' Women
- Discussions of the factors contributing to violence usually focus on the role of men, ignoring women participants or portraying them as silent onlookers and victims.
- Institutionalised Violence: Qur'an 4:34 and the Islamic Exegetical Tradition
- For William Byrd II, gendered violence was part of the daily routine. Born to wealth in 1674, Byrd owned thousands of acres in Virginia and oversaw dozens of people who made his estate profitable.
- Social Convention, Conformity and Violence
- Domestic Violence in Abbasid Adab Anthologies
- Situations of Violence
- Shame and the Value of Women in Contemporary Madura