Women in the Medieval Common Law c.1200–1500 by Gwen Seabourne

Author:Gwen Seabourne [Seabourne, Gwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Medieval
ISBN: 9781134775972
Google: URYcEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-04-06T16:03:15+00:00

Victims, agents, both and neither

It has become common in discussions of medieval women to deploy the terms ‘agent’ (or ‘agency’) and, separately or by way of contrast, ‘victim’. These terms, ‘victim’ and ‘agent’, however, raise some particular problems in the area of wrongs to women and women’s complaints, which must be considered. They encourage a strong distinction between roles or perspectives which cannot easily be separated, and they may have other, more general distorting effects, for example by encouraging focus on those able to take action rather than those rendered less able to do so by a variety of factors and structures, including the legal.44

There is a tendency, in recent histories of women and gender, to claim that other historians portray women as victims, and that this must be corrected. Thus, for example, a statement in a recent study of women’s intellectual leadership claimed that ‘… modern scholars have … tended to study … women, generally, as victims’.45 In such statements, ‘victim’ tends to be coloured, explicitly or implicitly, with disapproval; thus we see the construction of the ‘passive victim’, the ‘cowering victim’, the ‘helpless victim’, the ‘willing victim’, the victim set in opposition to the saint or virago or to the ‘agent’.46 I would like to suggest that there is a need to reconsider some of this species of ‘victim talk’. In such commentary, ‘victim’ seems, at times, to have unstable or overlapping meanings, covering both one who has been wronged on a particular occasion and also importing a larger-scale judgement on an individual or group, generally oppressed by some situation or structure.47 The latter ‘holistic’ usage alienates many modern commentators on women’s history or gender history, who do not see or do not wish to tell a story of general disadvantage or victimisation of medieval women.48 It is interesting to note that, despite such frequent usage in modern works, ‘victim’ is not a word generally encountered in classical medieval common law sources, and its use in other writings of the medieval period might be very different, with one prevalent image – that of Jesus as victim – likely to have lent it a much less negative resonance to contemporaries.49 We should also note that the word ‘victim’ is sometimes brought in in later translation, when the original source describes one who is wronged in much more mundane, neutral terms.50 Although none of this should be a bar to its use in modern commentary, it should serve to raise questions as to whether considering wrongs to medieval women or reaching a negative conclusion as to their situation is appropriately summarised in this way, with the word ‘victim’. Some clarification and improvement in this area of discussion may be introduced by appealing to the considerable modern legal scholarship interrogating the usage of ‘victim’, especially that by scholars of criminal justice.51 It would, for example, be useful to bear in mind distinctions between the ‘bilateral individualist construction of victimhood’ (relating to a person affected by an identifiable action) and broader constructions of a person’s or a group’s entire existence as partaking of the nature of victimhood.

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