Women and Violence in the Late Medieval Mediterranean, ca. 1100-1500

Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Università di Milano Statale. She held research positions in the UK, Canada, and Italy. Her work focuses on the influence of Christian spirituality on the development of criminal justice in the late medieval Italian communes. Lorenzo Caravaggi completed his doctorate at Balliol College, University of Oxford, with a thesis on the dynamics of peacekeeping in late-medieval Italy. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The University of East Anglia, with a project on the ethical and literary underpinnings of criminal law in fourteenth-century Europe. Giulia Maria Paoletti holds an M.St. in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. She was awarded an Ernst Mach Grant to work at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her work focuses on Byzantine poetry, monastic literature and more broadly on the Palaiologan period.

Introduction: Medieval and Modern Gender-Based Violence

Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues, Lorenzo Caravaggi, Giulia M. Paoletti

Part I: Women and War

1. "Both General and Lady": the 1135 Defence of Gangra by its Amira

Maximilian Lau

2. Representations of women’s violence in the epic: the female ‘furor’ in the Old French Guillaume d’Orange Cycle, the Byzantine Digenis Akritis and the Persian Shahnameh by Ferdowsi

Nina Soleymani Majd

3. Reflections on Women’s Behaviour in War Contexts in Communal Italy (Twelfth-Thirteenth centuries)

Alberto Luongo

4. À l’épreuve des guerres seigneuriales. Des rôles féminins dans la trame de l’Histoire de Corse (quinzième siècle)

Lucie Arrighi

Part II: Women and Criminal Courts

5. Opportunities to Charge Rape in Thirteenth-Century Bologna

Carol Lansing

6. Legal regulation of sex crimes in medieval Serbia and its Mediterranean communes under its rule

Nina Kršljanin

7. Lascivious crimes and legitimate proofs: women and the juridical transformation of Norman and Staufen Sicily

Philippa Byrne

Part III: Violence and Female Social Roles

8. La parrèsia comme expression de la violence féminine à Byzance

Élisabeth Malamut

9. Slavery and Violence Against Women in Renaissance Central Italy

Loek Luiten

10. ‘With her aid, direction, and fervor’: Women and the Politics of Lordship in Fourteenth-Century Tuscany

Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm

11. Gendering Crime in Byzantium: Abortion, Infanticide and Female Violence

Stephanie Novasio

Conclusion

Annick Peters-Custot