Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages [Hardcover]

Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the local abbot and then abducted by her feudal superior. Agnes Grantham was a successful businesswoman ambushed and assaulted in a forest whilst on her way to dine with the Master of St Leonard's Hospital. Alice Brathwell was a respectable widow who attracted the attentions of a supposedly aristocratic conman. These are their stories.Alice de Rouclif: An Eventful Childhood William Pottell: Stories and Storytellers Ellen Taliour: Gender and the Remembrance of Times Past Robert Thewed: The Ties of Tenure and Locality Anabilla Wastelyne: The Ties of Kinship Dom. William Marrays: Stories and Readers Alice Through the Looking Glass Brewing Trouble: The Devout Widow's Tale Patriarchy, Civic Identity and the Widow of Doncaster

Goldberg's book has a little of everything - detailed archival work, courtroom drama, theoretical speculation, microhistory, macrohistory, every social class possible and plenty of gender groups, biography, and late medieval England, all in the service of a question about the legal history of rape. It's like a stylistic melding of Natalie Zemon Davis's Martin Guerre with Duby's William Marshal: Flower of Chivalry. The cast of characters in the beginning is a great touch. - Bonnie Wheeler, English and Medieval Studies, Southern Methodist University

The book gives us a good picture of how a court case of this sort worked in practice, with lots of insights into actual and potential complications on the societal and legal levels. - Speculum

Goldberg's study will be of great interest to specialists of pre-modern canon law, especially in regard to women's right to choose to marry or to have sex, as well as to the power men may exercise over them. In this regardlSQ