Keynote Speakers
Julie Hardwick, “Legal intimacies: where the law was â and wasnât – in early modern womenâs reproductive lives”
Michelle Armstrong-Partida, “Gender, Concubinage & a Shared Sexual Culture in the Late Medieval Mediterranean”
The premodern Mediterranean functioned as an intense zone of exchange and interaction that facilitated the transmission of culture, cuisine, technology, ideas, art, and goods that produced a distinct culture that was mutually intelligible to all those who traveled its sea. This includes a shared practice of concubinage that cut across religious and political lines. Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants who kept enslaved women as concubines from the Baltics, Central Asia, and Africa illustrate not only a pan Mediterranean phenomenon but also show that concubinage was a distinctive feature of Mediterranean society. Indeed, merchants who traveled and lived abroad in colonial societies and in Islamicate lands with their enslaved or free born concubines reinforced the practice. This talk focuses on the free and enslaved women who provided sexual services and companionship, labored as a household servant or manager, and operated as cultural brokers for the merchants and travelers of the Mediterranean as men conducted business and settled into foreign communities in port cities.
Panelists
Paolo Astorri, (University of Copenhagen): âParental Authority, Privacy, and the Reformation of Marriageâ
The Lutheran Reformation reshaped the dynamics between family and marriage. A valid marriage required the approval of the parents and the presence of witnesses. The couple must express their vows publicly in the Church and get their marriage registered in the Church registers. Such a transformation of the concept of marriage, which for the Catholic Church did not require parental approval and a public form before the Council of Trent, raised new issues. Was the consent of both parents necessary? Did sons and daughters have any right to obtain the consent? What were the strategies to get married without parental consent? How women could be protected from double (clandestine and public) marriages? This paper proposes to address these and other questions looking at Lutheran legal and theological tracts and at marriage laws. It will also compare the new regulation of marriage with the one enforced in the Roman Catholic lands.
Paolo Astorri (1984) is currently Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Centre for Privacy Studies. In 2018, he received his doctorate in Law from the KU Leuven (Belgium). His dissertation, Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in the Early Modern Period (ca. 1520-1720), has been published by Brill in 2019. Astorri studied Law at the University of Macerata (2004-2008) and Canon Law at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome (2009-2013). He was a member of the Junior Research Group of the LOEWE Research Focus ‘Extrajudicial and Judicial Conflict Resolution’ at the Max-Planck-Institut fĂŒr europĂ€ische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main (2013-2014).
Sara Beam, (Associate Professor, University of Victoria): âEarly Modern Infanticide Laws and the Will to Executeâ
Many early modern European jurisdictions enacted draconian criminal legislation that make it possible to convict mothers of infanticide when they gave birth secretly and then their infant died. Aggressive prosecution for infanticide in northern Europe as well as pamphlets and ballads that popularized hostile stereotypes of infanticidal mothers created a morally-charged discourse that defined some mothers as unnatural and un-Christian. New archival research is, however, starting to reveal that only a small minority of suspicious infant deaths were prosecuted in early modern Europe. This paper will show how authorities often turned a blind eye to possible infanticides in early modern Geneva. This longstanding hypocritical pattern, of publicizing a discourse of âmonstrous motherhoodâ while actually ignoring many suspicious infant deaths, empowered Europeans engaged in colonialism to define non-European mothers who neglected or killed some of their offspring as inherently monstrous and uncivilized.
Sara Beam is Associate Professor of History at the University of Victoria. She works on the history of human rights, torture, sex crimes, religious freedom and satire and political expression in early modern France and Switzerland in the early modern period. She is the author of Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (2007) which won the Bainton Prize for History awarded by the Sixteenth Century Studies Society.
Ninja Bumann, (PhD student University of Vienna): âGendered Agency in Habsburg Sharia Courts. Marriage and Divorce in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878-1918)â
Following the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, the newly established Habsburg government incorporated the hitherto existing Sharia courts which were competent to regulate marriage, family, and inheritance among the Muslim population. This integration of Sharia courts led to several modifications which also affected the agency of different actors before court. The paper analyzes the integration of Islamic law into the Habsburg administration in the field of marriage and divorce regulations and its consequences for legal practice. While Islamic legal provisions were gendered per se, the Habsburg legal reforms unequally impacted the agency of Muslim men and women. The paper argues that the newly imposed appeal mechanism as well as increasing legal formalism fostered paternal control in arranging marriages. At the same time, the Habsburg legal reforms did often not address the legal and practical hurdles that especially Muslim women faced when regulating marriage and divorce.
Ninja Bumann is a PhD Candidate at the Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, where she currently also serves as a University Assistant at the Institute for East European History. In her doctoral dissertation project, she analyzes the negotiation and regulation of Islamic marriage and divorce in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina by using Sharia court records. She completed her Master of Arts in East European History at the University of Vienna.
Siglinde Clementi, (Senior Researcher, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano): âTransregional marriages. Legal norms and social practices in a territory of transition. The case of Tyrolean nobility in the early modern period.â
In the early modern period Tyrol was a legal transitional area between the German lands and the Italian territories. The coexistence of several legal statutes characterizes this intermediate position. The Tyrolean noble families, who lived in the heterogeneous Tyrolean dominion, essentially adhered to the provincial order (Landesordnung), but in special cases, for example in the case of a transregional marriage, they also oriented themselves to the legal norms of the neighboring countries. The paper examines the legal orientation in the case of transregional marriages and examines how social legal practice was structured in these cases. The legal transitional area of the Tyrol becomes tangible by the specific example of transregional marriages. The Italian dowry system based on Roman law and the marriage property system of the German states meet here and enter into an interesting relationship, not only but especially in the marriage contracts of transregional marriages.
Dr. Siglinde Clementi is vice-director of the Competence Centre for Regional History at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano where she leads the research area gender and womenâs history. She led numerous research projects, for example the project âLegal spaces and gender order as social processes in a trans-regional perspective. Negotiating and stipulating property in urban and rural contexts of southern Tirol from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuryâ. Research interests: Gender and womenâs history, microhistory and research on self narratives, history of the body and of medicine in the early modern period, cultural history of birth and of nobility, regional history of Tyrol. Main publication include Körper, Selbst und Melancholie. Die Selbstzeugnisse des Landadeligen Osvaldo Ercole Trapp (1634â1710) (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 26), Köln/Weimar/Wien 2017. She is now working on a research project about wealth arrangements, gender and kinship relations in the Tyrolean nobility of the early modern period.
Elizabeth S. Cohen, (Professor emerita, York University), âWorking Class Women and Criminal Justice in Rome circa 1600â
While law encumbered early modern women in many ways, their agency in legal proceedings varied with the kinds of law and with class. In criminal and Catholic ecclesiastical courts in Italy, women, especially of middling and lower social rank, played by choice and by coercion various roles: complainants, defendants, and very often witnesses. A 1601 trial from the Governorâs court in Rome for the crime of suborning witnesses shows ordinary urban women in all of these roles, using the law both to stir up domestic strife and to work towards a resolution. During Carnival, the fractious Angela charged her in-laws in the Vicarâs court with immoral conduct. Abandoning her marital household and drawing in her natal family household, both headed by widows, Angela supported her case by pressuring two young servant girls into false testimony. The ecclesiastical court took up the case and several family members were jailed. At Easter, however, the younger girl, confessed her error to her priest and received instructions to make amends. Informal negotiations followed and, later, a countersuit in the criminal court accused Angela and her kin. Women were critical actors in all stages of this tangled legal story.
Elizabeth (Libby) Cohenuses the criminal court archives of early modern Rome to reconstruct the lives and words of ordinary urban women. Her themes include work, family, prostitution, sex crimes, street rituals, self-representation, oralities, legal rhetoric, and the social history of women artists, in particular, Artemisia Gentileschi. With Thomas V. Cohen, she co-authored Daily Life in Renaissance Italy (2nd ed., 2019). With Margaret Reeves, she co-edited The Youth of Early Modern Women (2018). Recent publications include catalogue essays for art exhibitions in Rome and Cologne.
Thomas Cohen, (York University) âA Deaf Mute Woman Makes a Will: (Rome 1590)â
I treat one intriguing document, an accidental find. Maddalena, twice married, a successful mother, born deaf, cannot speak. And yet she wants to make her will while her mother, still living, can express her desires, as Maddalena has in all the world no other ear or mouthpiece. Through interpreters, she petitions the pope; give me a magistrate to make this happen. Our document, a marvel of notarial precision, describes law’s proceedings, and the five tests the magistrate applies to establish that Maddalena is indeed a legal person, not a ward, an imbecilla, and that her testament, which she can neither utter herself, nor read, nor hear read back to her, will have the power to face down all future challenges. Each test probes a different aspect of Maddalena’s personhood, as economic actor, as proper Christian, as a Roman who knows her city well, and as a wife and social being with a charming sense of humour. My question, for the conference: what do these five tests show us about a Roman court’s understanding of a woman’s traits that, behind disability’s thick veils, warranted full personhood and legal capacity. And, more broadly, how does this Roman case fit into European legal procedures for acting for disabled persons?
Thomas V. Cohen did his BA at the University of Michigan (1964) and his PhD at Harvard (1974). He taught at York University, Toronto, from 1969 to 2019 and is now emeritus. For many decades, he worked on the social and political anthropology of early modern Rome, using mainly the papers of the criminal courts to investigate values, language, narrative strategies, and transactional culture. Much of his work uses microhistorical technique and esthetic exposition, as in Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2004) and Roman Tales (Routledge, 2019).
BaĆak Derinel, (Researcher, School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham): âJuridical Romanization in Turkey and Its Impact on Gender Dynamicsâ
Gender refers to the social construction of norms, attitudes and roles assigned to âwomenâ and âmenâ. Even though for decades scholars have debated the impact of nature on gender identity, it is distinct from biological differences often referred to as âsexâ. This paper seeks to examine the interactions between juridical Romanization in Turkey and its impact on gender dynamics. It will explore how Roman legal system shaped the understanding of women in the young republic. It will mainly focus on the effect of the transformation of civil law in Turkey on the gender construction. Therefore, it will analyze the status of women in Turkish Civil Code with specific references on the law of persons, family law and inheritance law by comparing it with the status of women in the Ottoman Empire.
BaĆak Derinel is a researcher within the School of History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. She finished the Law Faculty of the Marmara University/Istanbul and in 2005 she graduated from the LLM program in Private Law from Galatasaray University. In 2008 she completed a doctorate level course in Roman Law at the Institute of Roman Law and East Mediterranean Laws, Department of Juridical Sciences of the Sapienza University in Rome. She completed his PhD in Roman and Civil Law at Sapienza University of Rome. Her doctoral dissertation on the juridical situation of the unborn child in Roman and Turkish Law was conducted under the supervision of Professor Pierangelo Catalano.
Evdoxios Doxiadis, (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University): âIslamic Law and the Modern Greek State in the 19th centuryâ
Greek historiography perceives the emergence of modern Greek law as a struggle between competing European concepts of law, represented by the proponents of the Napoleonic Codes and those favoring the creation of a code based upon customary practices, an idea strongly espoused by German legal scholars in the early 19th century. What this debate tends to ignore is the presence of religious minorities in the new state as well as the long history of Islamic law in the region. Using the evidence from the appeals court of Athens this paper will argue that Greek courts in the 19th century were willing to consider Islamic law in the guise of customary law when dealing with Muslims or recent converts and that this de facto acceptance of Islamic law facilitated the later formal acceptance of Islamic family law when an expanding Greece incorporated greater numbers of Muslims.
Evdoxios Doxiadis is an associate professor in history at Simon Fraser University. His research is on Greek, Balkan, and Mediterranean history with a focus on the 18th and 19th centuries and a particular interest in questions of gender, law, state formation, and minorities. In addition to several articles in journals and edited volumes, he has published two monographs The Shackles of Modernity: Women, Property, and the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Greek State 1750-1850 (2011), and State, Nationalism and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece (2018) and has co-edited the volume Living under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis (2018) with Aimee Placas.
Ida Ferrero, (University of Turin) âWomenâs liability and the Scuola positiva of criminal law in Italy and Japanâ
My intervention focuses on the influence of the Italian Scuola positiva of criminal law in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century. The method of the Scuola positiva focused on the biological and psychological features of the offenders and assumed that those elements influenced the criminal attitude of the wrongdoers. The intellectuals belonging to that school devoted much attention to the role of women in the field of criminal law: they studied femaleâs mental and physical conditions and believed that there were differences not only between menâs and womenâs bodies but also in their intellectual skills. Because of these presumed differences between male and females, they affirmed that womenâs liability should have been submitted to different legislative standards. My research will study how gender constructions in the two countries extended to the field of criminal liability and contributed to the rise of the approach of the Scuola Positiva.
Ida Ferrero graduated summa cum laude from the School of Law of the University of Turin in 2010 with a dissertation in History of Law. She joined the University of Milanâs doctorate program in History of Law and in 2015 she successfully defended her dissertation titled Teaching and opening lectures at the Turin School of Law from 1846 through the Italian Reunification. She has been teaching at the University Luiss since 2016, and from 2019 she has been a Research fellow in Legal History at the Department of Law in Turin. She also spent two months as a visiting researcher at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis. Her publications consist of two books and 20 papers. In 2019 she passed the qualifying examination necessary to be an assistant professor in history of law.
Ellinor Forster, (Assistant Professor, University of Innsbruck): âThe Influence of European Models of Marital Law in the Public Discussions of Legal Reform in the United States ca. 1900â
Around the turn of the twentieth century public debates on marital laws in the US were framed with reference to the wider European scene and not just British Common Law as is often the case today. Newspapers reported in detail reforms, new legal codes, and court decisions from Europe and emphasis was given to divorce and mixed confessional marriages, reflective of the American importance placed on religion in society. This paper will analyse the perception of European legal marriage norms in the United States around 1900 against the backdrop of American legal reform. It seeks to identify what was accepted, what provoked debate, and what was (wilfully) ignored from the debates in Austria, Germany, France and Sweden. Answering such questions will not only give insight into the global contexts of American legal reform but will also show how European legal systems impacted American legal traditions in the 20th century.
Ellinor Forster studied history and Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. She was a researcher in several projects at the Department for History and European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck. In 2015 she was a Visiting Fellow for Humanities at the University of Silesia in Opava, Czech Republic and in 2016/2017 a Fellow at the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, followed by a position as a Senior Lecturer at the Department for Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz in 2017/2018. In September 2018 she returned to the University of Innsbruck, as an Assistant Professor at the Department for History and European Ethnology. Her research interests are Legal History, Gender History, Spatial Concepts, Political and Symbolic Communication. Since the year 2000 she is a member of the network Gender Differences of European Legal Cultures.
Sakis Gekas, (Associate Professor, York University): âLaw and colonialism. The Ionian Islands Civil Code and gender dynamics (1815 to 1864); property, dowry, divorceâ
This paper will discuss first the legal regime in the âUnited States of the Ionian Islandsâ, the British protectorate in the Ionian Sea (1815-1864), and the role of courts and the ecclesiastical authority of the Archbishop before the Ionian Civil code. The Code was drafted in 1829, but was ratified by the British High Commissioner in 1841; this gap often created legal confusion. The paper explores the impact of the code on gender relations, on divorce and property relations and traces the imprint of other legal traditions, local and foreign such as the Napoleonic Code, to explore the impact of the code on gender relations. The paper will look at divorce, dowry and property dispute cases through notary archives of Corfu, Paxos and Kefalonia, two of the larger and one smaller Ionian islands with ample historical material available, to discuss the negotiation between local legal traditions and colonialism-generated institutions.
Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas is Associate Professor and Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair of Modern Greek History and Hellenic Studies at York University. He has published on the history of the Ionian Islands and on aspects of Greek and Mediterranean economic and social history. His publications include Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815â1864 (Berghahn Books, 2017); âFrom the Nation to Emancipation: Greek Women Warriors from the Revolution (1820s) to the Civil War (1940s)â, in Boyd Cothran, Joan Judge, and Adrian Shubert (eds.). Women Warriors and National Heroes. Global Histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 113-130.
Subhasree Ghosh, (University of Calcutta): âThe Rule of Law and the Role of Law: Colonial Administration and Social Norms in Nineteenth-Century Indiaâ
This paper seeks to explore how the British administration in India used law as a tool to âciviliseâ âbarbaricâ Indians. One indicator of civilization according to colonial ideology was the condition of women and India lagged behind since Indian women were âdegradedâ in the name of religion. The issue that will be highlighted in this paper is the age of consent. The colonial government attempted to pass a slew of acts throughout the nineteenth century that would raise the age of consent and marriage to free the girl-child from the fetters of early marriage and consummation. Understandably, the indigenous society was not receptive to the idea of foreign intervention to its century-old social norms and hence nineteenth century is a saga of clash of ideas and ethos were religion and law were sometimes pitted against each other and sometimes used on the same plane to justify the other.
Received Phd from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India in Modern History. Subsequently, was engaged as a post-doctoral fellow at Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. At present engaged as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the undergraduate level at the University of Calcutta. Major publications include, âComing of Age in Colonial India: The Discourse and Debate over the Age of Consummation in Nineteenth Centuryâ in Kristine Moruzzi and Michelle J. Smith ed. Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950.
Alexandra Guerson (Assistant Professor, New College, University of Toronto) and Dana Wessell Lightfoot (Professor, University of Northern British Columbia), “Legal Pluralism, Marriage, and Conversion in late medieval Girona”
Alexandra Guerson is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at New College, University of Toronto. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto, where she defended a dissertation entitled âCoping with Crises: Christian-Jewish relations in Catalonia and Aragon, 1380-1391.â Alexandra has won major research grants from the Canadian government (SSHRC-CGS) and the Ontario and Quebec governments (OGS and FQRSC) and her research has been published in the journals Jewish History and Sefarad.
Dana Wessell Lightfoot is a Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. Her monograph, Women, Dowries, and Agency: Marriage in 15th c. Valencia was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. She is an inaugural member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.
Nere Jone Intxaustegi Jauregi, (Associate Professor, Deusto University): âCivil Law in Early Modern Biscay: when women and men were equalâ
Although Biscay is in northern Spain, during the Early Modern Age did not share Castilian Law but its own. This territory had various chaters and laws, which were known as fueros. This normative was very different from the surrounding ones, and it is possible to see that in the fueros existed a gender equality. In this way, for example women participated on an equal footing with the husband in the properties of the marriage and the latter needed his wifeâs consent to be able to dispose of those goods. She could also be named the successor in the familial patrimony, displacing the principle of masculinity of other legal systems. This situation could create difficult cases, since the people from Biscay emigrated not only to various Spanish cities but also to Indias, where they had the prerrogative to use their native law.
After having achieved a PhD in History (University of the Basque Country, Spain, 2017) with a thesis that deals with religious women in Biscay during the Early Modern Age, I completed a PhD in Law (Public University of Navarre, Spain). I am currently an associate professor at University of Deusto in Bilbao (Spain). My research is focused on Basque and Spanish history, society and legal institutions during the 15-19th centuries.
Susanna Kallio, (PhD candidate, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki): âThe Feminist Issue of Fan Fiction as Copyright Exceptionâ
Continental European view of copyright, droit dâauteur, places strong emphasis on authorâs moral rights, and the belief in the natural right of authors to their creative works carries on into EU law and control over secondary creativity such as fan fiction. In the US, fair use doctrine developed, and it has been raised as defence of this primarily female-practiced, feminine and feminist fan fiction culture, against overprotective right holders, however, the situation is more complicated and less discussed in the EU. While North American feminist copyright scholars have concentrated on this gender issue in their territory, I will examine how copyright exceptions adopted into EU legislation developed differently, to the detriment of fan fiction as a gender and minority issue today. I argue that the European legal tradition of droit dâauteur and the attitudes that suggest leaving negotiations between authors and fan writers, lead to private censure of minority cultures.
Susanna Kallio, M.Sc., is a PhD candidate in Commercial Law at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. Her doctoral thesis project explores gender dynamics in intellectual property law, examining copyright and trademark law, as well as biopatenting and plant variety protection from the perspective of feminist legal theory. Her research on feminist philosophy and gender issues in IP law is also part of the Academy of Finland funded research project FAirness, Morality and Equality in international and European Intellectual Property Law (FAME-IP).
Evgenia Kermeli, (Professor, Hacettepe University): âThe binding force of words: Establishing proof in the oral procedures of Islamic divorce and inheritanceâ
The words are magic when it comes to Islamic procedural rules on divorce. As divorce is the exclusive right of Muslim men, their utterance of the triple divorce formula has an immediate effect. While establishing the orality of the divorce in the Islamic courts is fairly easy if the divorce was intent, complications arise when women and men claim different versions of âtruthâ in the kadi court. The aim of this paper is to explore, the legal strategies employed by litigants in establishing the actuality of divorce. Frequently used by women as a tool to escape from an unhappy marriage without sacrificing monetary compensations, âunintendedâ divorce transforms into a source of dispute. In particular, if the alleged divorce occurs soon before the death of the husband, heirs employ it to exclude the wife from inheritance. Husbands, on the other hand, fight back the assertion that an irrevocable divorce has occurred to avoid both emotional and financial complications. Utilizing examples from the 16th and 17th century kadi courts of Istanbul and Konya, the paper will attempt to drew conclusions on strategies employed by litigants from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds. Muslims, non-Muslims, new converts, men and women substantiate their claims on the basis of loopholes in jurisprudence. Therefore, the legal opinions of leading 17th centuries jurisconsults will be discussed jointly with court cases.
Dr. Evgenia Kermeli, is a Professor of Islamic/Ottoman Law at the Institute of Turkish Studies at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. Having previously taught at The Victorian University of Manchester, Liverpool University and Bilkent University, Ankara, Dr. Kermeli is the co-editor of Islamic Law: Theory and Practice, I.B. Tauris 1997 and she has published extensively on muslim and non-muslim legal matters, coexistence and conflict, the legal framework of non-muslim religious foundations in mortmain in islamic jurisprudence. In 2009, she worked on legal pluralism and the role of custom as senior research fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program in the Law Faculty of Harvard University. As the president of the International Society of Islamic Legal Studies (ISILS), she is currently preparing the next annual conference on Islamic Legal Studies and a series of podcasts on different aspects of islamic law in place and time.
Sara L. Kimble, (Associate Professor, DePaul University): âFrom the margins to the center: Exchanges on law, gender, and jury service between France and the American West, 1870 to 1900â
In 1877, French womenâs rights leader LĂ©on Richer proclaimed that France should emulate the innovations in the western United States where mixed-sex criminal juries had been instituted. The American west was a site of experimentation in womenâs rights that the âold worldâ hommes politiques and activists wished to study for evidence of ways to proceed. The history of the European debate about female jurors in Wyoming demonstrates the contested nature of this right and the intertwined history of womenâs rights movements in geographically distanced locations. The ânew worldâ of the American west served as a model for gendered rights reform for the âold worldâ to consider. Examining these intersections, this paper will complement my recent publication in Law and History Review that analyzed the history of a feminist critique of French law, particularly the legal systemâs handling of domestic violence, reproduction, and marriage during the belle Ă©poque.
Sara L. Kimble is Associate Professor and SCPS Director of Undergraduate Programs at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She researches on modern French history, legal history, and womenâs history with publications in French Colonial History, French Historical Studies, German Historical Institute Bulletin, and Acta Poloniae Historica. She co-edited with Marion Röwekamp a 16-chapter book: New Perspectives on Modern European Womenâs Legal History (2017). Her most recent publications are: âOf âMasculine Tyrannyâ and the âWomenâs Juryâ: The Gender Politics of Jury Service in Belle Ăpoque France,â Law and History Review 37:4 (2019) and âPolitics, Money, and Distrust: French-American Alliances in the International Campaign for Womenâs Equal Rights, 1925â1930â in Nimisha Barton and Richard Hopkins ed., Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender and the State in Modern France (2019).
Mirela KreĆĄiÄ, (Full Professor, University of Zagreb): âIn Pursuit of Economic Emancipation: the Lady of the House or the Servant?â
The aim of the paper is to explore the interaction between regulatory provisions governing the status of women, which were part of Croatiaâs legal system as it developed in the short 19th century (1848-1914). The Austrian General Civil Code, the Hungarian Trade Code and Industry Act and the Croatian School Act constitute the backbone of the research. More specifically, the focus is on those provisions that enabled the economic emancipation of women in the context of guaranteed gender equality and access to education. Given the economic circumstances in the period under review, the opportunities as well as the restrictions faced by women on the labour market of the time, our intention is to ascertain whether and if so in what way the Austrian and Hungarian acts, accompanied by Croatiaâs autonomous legislative framework, influenced the process of transformation of the traditional understanding of womenâs status in society.
Mirela KreĆĄiÄ is a Full Professor of Law and the Head of an Institute of a Legal History and Roman Law at the Faculty of Law University of Zagreb where she teaches âCroatian Legal Historyâ and âWomenÂŽs Legal Historyâ. Her research interests focus on the Croatian legal history especially in the field of private law (e.g. inheritance law, commercial law) and womenÂŽs legal history. She is a member of the editorial board of Journal on European History of Law (JEHL) and Journal of Contemporary History (Äasopis za suvremenu povijest).
Nina KrĆĄljanin, (Assistant Professor, University of Belgrade): “Gender in the Serbian Civil Code: Between Ottoman Legacy and Western Influences“
When Serbia passed its Civil Code in 1844, the country was formally part of the Ottoman Empire whose four centuries of rule had left a heavy footprint on Serbian society and customary law with women in a more subordinate position than in the Middle Ages. An important part of the countryâs struggle for modernization and independence, the Civil Code shows a conflict between the old and the new, Eastern and Western, modern and patriarchal influences, and nowhere is it as obvious as in gender differences. While Jovan HadĆŸiÄ, the creator of the Code, mostly followed Austrian and French models, he also included some patriarchal customs giving priority to male heirs and limiting the legal capacity of married women. This article will analyze gender constructions and conflicts according to the SCC, show the influences on the legislator and strive to show the impact of its key gender-related provisions on Serbian society.
Dr Nina KrĆĄljanin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, Department of Legal History. She has a PhD in medieval Serbian law (âSerbian medieval charters as the source of DuĆĄan’s Codeâ). Her other research areas include parliamentary history, civil law, customary law, as well as the legal position of women and gender studies. She is currently a participant in the project of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law “The identity transformation of Serbia” and the Erasmus Plus project “Strategic Partnership for the Development of a Masterâs Study Program LAW AND GENDER â LAWGEM”.
Margareth Lanzinger, (Professor, University of Vienna): âA dowry system in Southern Tyrol? Gender-related implications in a transitional spaceâ
South Tirol is well suited for an analysis of legal practice because it was a transitional space where two legal cultures met. The use of both âItalianâ and âGermanâ law can be verified early on with influence from neighboring statutory regulations (Grisons, Swabia, Trent, Görz/Gorizia and Venice). In contrast to the dowry system of most Italian territories, women endowed with a marriage portion (Heiratsgut) were not excluded from further claims to inheritance. The Tirol law code (Tiroler Landesordnung) only stipulated renouncement of inheritance for noble daughters (1532, 1573, III, 34, § 1). But in a few individual court districts in southern Tirol â those of Neumarkt and Kaltern â we find sixteenth- and seventeenth-century renunciation declarations by daughters from the peasant, trade, and merchant milieus. This seems to be a perfect example of a transitional space and of different legal cultures. The paper investigates gender-related implications of this specific practice.
Margareth Lanzinger is professor for economic and social history at the Department of Economic and Social History of the University of Vienna. Her research interests are within the area of micro-history, historical anthropology and gender history, especially on the topics of kinship, marriage, property and the power of disposal as well as legal and administrative practices, on the construction of heroes as well as historiographic topics. She is a member of the editorial board of several journals â LâHomme. Z.F.G. (until 2020), Historische Anthropologie, Zeitschrift fĂŒr Agargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie and Quaderni Storici. Her last research project was focusing on âThe Role of Wealth in Defining and Constituting Kinship Spaces from sixteenth to the eighteenth Centuryâ (FWF â Austrian Science Fund).
Aaron Larsen, (DPhil Student, University of Oxford): “Death Sentences as Spatial Archives: The Witch Trials of Zug, Switzerland and the Reconstruction of a Womanâs World through Archival Source Mapping“
Between 1558 and 1748, the Canton of Zug, Switzerland, oversaw 197 witch trials, of which 192 resulted in the death of the accused. At the end of this era in 1737, Zug held its last major series of witch trials, seeing nine women and one man put on trial and only the man and his daughter surviving. Throughout the trial proceedings, meticulous records were kept, in which every question and answer between interrogator and the accused was dutifully recorded. While these records provide insight into the legal proceedings of eighteenth century Switzerland, they also provide historians with a rare glimpse into the world of those whose stories are often lost: common women. This presentation will explore the use of GIS technology paired with womenâs trial records. By mapping out these trial records, the worldviews of early modern women become clear as the boundaries of their realities become tangible.
Aaron Larsen is a PhD student at Oxford University. His current research explores the concept of borders and boundaries through the 1737-1738 witch trials of Zug, Switzerland. A two-time alumnus of UNBC after obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in History (with a double minor in Anthropology and Human Geography) and a Bachelor of Education, Aaron is a passionate advocate for History in the UNBC community. Aaron is a co-founder of the Northern Historical Conference, the former president of the Northern Historical Student Society, and the winner of UNBCâs Senate Leadership Award for Campus Leadership recognizing his work in the field of History over the past nine years.
Ivelina Masheva (Researcher, Historical Studies Institute, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences): âOrthodox Christian women and hereditary laws in Ottoman Bulgaria (1840 to 1870)â (REMOTE)
The Ottoman legal system allows simultaneous use of the Ottoman laic law (Kanun), the Muslim religious law (Sharia), the law applied in minoritiesâ religious courts and the customary law. The paper tries to examine the specific dispositions concerning the Orthodox women hereditary rights in each of these legal systems as well as their application scope in this period. The aim of the research is to identify the changes that occurred as a result of the Tanzimat reforms as well as the patterns and mechanisms in which the pluralistic legal framework was actually applied in practice. It investigates the advantages and disadvantages of each system with regard to women as well as their jurisdiction over different type of property (miri, mĂŒlk etc). Cases of overlapping jurisdiction are analyzed within a broader social and cultural context, which influences the choice of legal forum.
Ivelina Masheva is currently (from 2018) a researcher at the Historical Studies Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She graduated in History from Sofia University with a Masterâs thesis on the legal status of Bulgarian Women in the 1840-1870s. She obtained her doctoral degree at Sofia University in 2015. Her dissertation examines the shift from Islamic commercial law to the French commercial code in the Ottoman Empire (with a focus on Ottoman Bulgaria). She held research fellowships at various institutions, including the American Research Institute in Istanbul, Turkey (2012), the American Research center in Sofia (2014), University of Regensburg (2018), Central European University in Budapest (2017, 2020-ongoing: https://gender.ceu.edu/zarah-womens-labour-activism). The main areas of her research interests include the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans during nineteenth and twentieth centuries particularly in the field of legal history, social history, economic history, women and gender studies.
Allyson M. Poska, (Professor, University of Mary Washington): âMother, Widow, Wife: Jurisprudence, Legal Identities, and Female Agency in the Spanish Empireâ
Scholars often mischaracterize early modern womenâs relationship to the law as based on the notion that, as a result of their inherent weaknesses, women were legal minors who were unable to take full responsibility for their actions. However, in my experience working with legal documentation across the Spanish empire, I have found that judicial processes usually involved some negotiation in which not only did Castilian law offer different women different legal rights and responsibilities, but women clearly understood their legal options and made strategic choices about what kind of legal responsibility they wanted to accept and under what conditions. In this paper, I explore some of the different legal personae through which women could engage Castilian law â that of mother, widow, and wife — and discuss how their strategic employment of those personae offered critical opportunities for agency before the law.
Allyson M. Poska is Professor of History at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia and the author of four books: Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire (New Mexico, 2016), winner of the 2017 best book prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women; Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford, 2005), winner of the 2006 Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in early modern history or theology; Women and Gender in the Western Past (2 vols. coauthored with Katherine French, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), and Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Brill, 1998). I coedited The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (with Jane Couchman and Katherine McIver, Ashgate, 2013). I am also coeditor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (with Bernadette Andrea and Julie Campbell).
Marion Röwekamp, (Professor, Colegio de MĂ©xico): âAdoption of European legal codes and global legal ideas in MexicoÂŽs family law and family law reform in the 19th and 20th centuryâ
The talk will examine the influence of 19th century European civil codes as well as older legal European traditions on the family law construction in Mexico. Mexico passed a new civil code in 1866 modeled after several modern and traditional codes from Latin American and Europe. In 1859 civil marriage was introduced, civil divorce by mutual consent in 1917, and a new civil code in 1928. By adopting different legal ideas, the Mexican civil law proved to be more liberal for women than European codes. In addition to documenting the legal influences of the European codes on the construction of the family law, the talk will also analyze the legal ideas Mexican women used to support their fight against the state and Catholic church which determined most rules governing marriage, divorce, and the family, and to contextualize them in womenÂŽs global fight for equal rights in the family.
Marion Röwekamp is a historian (Dr. phil. Hist. University of Munich, 2008) and a full-time lawyer. She is the holder of the Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt Chair of the DAAD at the Colegio de MĂ©xico in Mexico City. Previously, she worked several times in the USA (2000/2001 Columbia University, New York City, 2007 Five Women College Studies and Research Center, South Hadley / MA, 2009/2010 John F. Kennedy Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard), in Mexico (Colegio de MĂ©xico, Instituto de Investigaciones HistĂłricas of UNAM in Mexico City) and the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin. Her latest book New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History was published with co-editor Sara Kimble in 2017 with Routledge, New York.
Regina SchÀfer (Research Associate, Johannes Gutenberg UniversitÀt Mainz): Women and law culture in a German town in the 15th century: the example of Augsburg
The paper presents results from research on terminology and ideas of legal-juridical administration in German towns. The 15th century seems to be a transition period for governance. The process of state building was parallel to a change within kinship organisations. Towards the end of the 15th century most noble families denied daughters the right to inherit land and noble women tended to disappear from our sources. We know little whether the situation of women in towns changed as well. The city councils in Germany knew Roman law and custom law (âLandrechtâ). However, practise often differed from the norms and various political and jurisdictional concepts coexisted and overlapped. In the 15th century, diverse, even adversarial legal principles existed side by side. The paper will use evidence from the city Augsburg to discuss the impact of a legal town culture on women.
Regina SchĂ€fer studied History, Literature, Sociology and Jounalism at the Universities of Mainz (Germany) and Dijon (France). She is Research Associate at the Department of Medieval History and Comparative Regional Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg UniversitĂ€t Mainz. Her research interests focus on women, social mobility, nobility and rural life in the Late Middle Ages. She is working on the edition and translation of the court records of the village Ingelheim (Ingelheimer HaderbĂŒcher). April 2020 she will join the project âLanguage of Governmental Practice in Late Medieval Towns. Aberdeen and Augsburg in Comparisonâ, founded by the DFG and AHRC.
Jennifer Spear (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University): âNavigating Changing Legal Regimes: Free Women of Color in New Orleans in the Era of the Louisiana Purchaseâ
Jennifer Spear is an Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She is a social historian of slavery and race in eighteenth-century North America. Focusing in particular on the city of New Orleans, which was successively colonized by the French, Spanish, and then the United States, she examines how these changes in sovereignty, and their associated legal systems, shaped the development of the cityâs distinctive racial order and the experiences of enslaved and free people of African ancestry under these three colonial regimes. Her current research, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, examines how free women of African descent experienced and navigated the transition from Spanish to U.S. governance in 1803, with its dramatic impact on the cityâs racial order and its substantial community of gens de couleur libre.
Tim Stretton (Professor, Saint Maryâs University): âDomestic Violence and English Common Law 1500-1800â
For centuries English Common Law licenced husbands to use physical force to âcorrectâ their wives. Rarely expressing it as a positive ârightâ, legal commentators tied the ability to use physical correction to the logic of coverture, the set of rules governing the legal status and condition of married women. Under coverture a husbandâs legal personality was seen to cover his wifeâs, providing him with a monopoly over household decision making and over the control of the coupleâs property. In the minds of male lawmakers and judges, as husbands were liable for their wivesâ behaviour and debts, they needed the ability to control them, by force if necessary. If a husband used unacceptable violence, then his wife could approach a magistrate to have him âbound overâ to good behaviour or to keep the peace, but this did nothing to address the violence that had occurred and simply created money penalties to deter future violence. She could also approach ecclesiastical authorities to seek a separation on the grounds of cruelty, but this could be expensive and was regularly met with demands from church officials that the couple attempt to reconcile.
In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some English women seeking protection from violence gained assistance from alternative legal bodies, including the Court of High Commission (until it abolition in 1642) and the equity court of Chancery. Increasing numbers also attempted to ensure their safety by including clauses in marriage settlements and private separation agreements that sought to guarantee them the resources necessary to live apart from their husbands in the event of violence. This paper explores these attempts to overcome deficiencies in the Common Law and considers the implications for legal thinking and practice in Britainâs many colonies that inherited the Common Law (including understandings of coverture) but not, in most cases, the alternative jurisdictions and legal instruments examined here.
Tim Stretton is a Professor of History at Saint Maryâs University in Canada. After completing law and history degrees at the University of Adelaide he gained a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge, supervised by Keith Wrightson. He has published widely on the topics of women, litigation, law and literature. He is the author of Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), the editor of Marital Litigation in the Court of Requests, 1542-1642 (Cambridge, 2008) and co-editor (with Krista Kesselring) of Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (McGill Queens University Press, 2013).
Christine Walker (Assistant Professor, Yale NUS College, Singapore) â ‘Never borrowed a shillingâ: Gender, Honor, and West Indian Slavery in Colonial New York”
In 1732, planter and merchant Josiah Martin penned a furious letter wherein he called a former friend a man of âvile and dishonest principles.â This outpouring of rage was sparked by a seemingly innocuous act. Seeking respite from life on the small island of Antiguaâthe settlement where the Martin family spent much of their timeâthey sojourned for two years in New York. Weeks before their departure, Josiahâs wife, Mary, hired out an enslaved woman whom they had transported up north to the wife of a family friend. When the Martins returned to the Caribbean, they left this captive woman behind. The arrangement quickly soured, provoking Josiah Martin to spill vitriolic invectives against his former confidant. This paper explores the underlying factors that caused the relationship between the two families to deteriorate so rapidly. If Mary Martin had been a man, or even an unmarried woman, it is unlikely that such a transaction would have surfaced in the archive. Maryâs legal and cultural status as a wife and mother, however, conflicted with the expertise she asserted as a West Indian enslaver in her New York dealings. While this agreement spoiled, it brings to light the myriad formal and informal exchanges, many of them involving free and enslaved women, that connected the Caribbean and North America in a rapidly expanding empire.
Christine Walker is an Assistant Professor of history at Yale-NUS College. She received a PhD from the University of Michigan (2014), an MA from the University of Connecticut (2007), and a BA from Yale University (2000). She specializes in the history of colonialism, gender and slavery in the Atlantic World. Her book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britainâs Atlantic Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, June 2020), examines the crucial roles played by women of European and African descent in making Jamaica the wealthiest and the largest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world.
Liv Helene Willumsen, (Professor Emerita, University of TromsĂž â the Arctic University of Norway): âThe Devil into the Laws: Demonological Ideas Impact on Gender in Witchcraft Trials in Denmark, Scotland and Finnmark, Norwayâ
This presentation will deal with witchcraft, which was a crime handled by criminal courts in Early Modern Europe. Focus will be on how ideas from the European doctrine of demonology entered the laws and influenced witchcraft trials in Scotland, Denmark and Finnmark, Norway during the late 1500s and early 1600s. The impact of demonological ideas was closely related to the gender element, as misogyny is prominent in demonological thinking. Through analyses of court proceedings from the three countries in question, emphasis will be put on the way the demonological content of the laws influenced the development and the outcome of the trials. By going into witchcraft trials in three countries, transnational transfer of demonological ideas will be taken into account, again highlighting the gender question.
Liv Helen Willumsen is Professor Emerita of History at the University of TromsĂž, UiT â the Arctic University of Norway. She has two PhD theses, one in literature from the University of Bergen (2003) and one in history from the University of Edinburgh (2008). Her specialism is witchcraft trials in Scotland and Northern Norway, and her books include Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Brill, 2013). She has been publishing several text-critical editions of the court records from the Finnmark witchcraft trials in Northern Norway. She is currently researching transference of demonological ideas across Europe. She was awarded the Norwegian Kingâs Medal of Merit in 2019.