Part front matter for Part One Gender and the Law

Extract

Social and cultural historians have long shown an interest in documents associated with crime and with acts deemed immoral or improper by those in power. Court records, legal statutes, and quasi-legal texts—such as officially authorized statements codifying orthodox and unorthodox behavior, or inquisitorial interrogations—often give us rare windows onto the actions and sometimes even thoughts of ordinary people who could not or typically did not write things that would end up in archives. Such documents, by defining the acts that the state considered a threat to social order, can give us a feel for the experiences of those whose lives left relatively few traces in the historical record.

Interestingly, studies based on such sources are often able to contribute to understandings of gender roles and ideas about sexuality.

Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie's classic village study, Mountaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1975)

, was based on the records of a fourteenth-century inquisitorial investigation. Its chapters include “Body Language and Sex” and “Marriage and Love,” among others. And the insights provided into early modern French understandings of gender roles are one of the great strengths of

The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)

by Natalie Davis, another pathbreaking contribution to the genre, which was based on a famous court case. In China studies, the most widely read foray into this genre is undoubtedly

Jonathan Spence's The Death of Woman Wang

. Its eponymous heroine is a figure who is known to posterity only because of a series of actions that violated laws of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Some of these are actions she herself took, such as running away from an unhappy marriage to join a lover. Others are acts committed by her husband: most notably, his killing her after she returned to him.

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