Preliminary Programme

In 1512, a man from the Pyrenean village of Vilamur confronted one of his neighbors who was reputed of being a witch. The man accused her of “giving him the goiter” through the use of some poisonous substance, and thus told her: “I swear that if you do not cure me, I will cut your throat”. Some years later, a woman from that same valley publicly smeared her own sister by calling her a witch and adding that “you deserve a good stack of firewood”, while some of the suspect’s neighbors went as far as to tell her husband that “they were going to make her burn”. This type of threats were a common feature in many towns and villages of the Principality of Catalonia, the Iberian territory with the largest number of anti-witchcraft procedures during the 15th and early 16th centuries.
The analysis of the extant judicial sources reveal a wide range of violent interactions between some stigmatized women and their male and female neighbors –even their own relatives– prior to the opening of the prosecutions themselves. The belief in the existence of some women allegedly capable of provoking illness and death by maleficent and diabolical means, fuelled a state of suspicion that left many female individuals at the mercy of their neighbors, who after branding them as witches –and therefore of being the cause of their misfortunes– eventually asked the local courts of justice to intervene.
Faced with this latent and dangerous menace, these women opted for a series of responses such as confrontation with their slanderers, mediation attempts, or temporary flight to avoid being put into trial, fearing the probable outcome of a judicial procedure completely devoid of any procedural guarantees. Some of these dynamics survived in many local communities after the end of the witch-hunt era. Although the last witchcraft trials in Catalonia date from the 17th century, the popular belief on wicthes continued in many rural areas and gave birth to a state of underground violence that erupted periodically in the form of popular outburst and even lynchings up until the late 19th century. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to study the violence suffered by girls and young women in the Crown of Aragon during the Late Middle Ages. The extant documents show examples of battered women and they reveal the humiliation and physical abuse these women experienced from their fathers, grandfathers, husbands and other men in their vicinity. More precisely, I will focus my analysis on rape cases and other forms of sexual abuse of girls, but also on early and forced marriages, which we can consider as another form of domination and violence against women.
The sources used for this purpose will be mainly court proceedings, in order to study not only the examples of the abuse they suffered, but also the attitudes that these women adopted against such violence. On one hand, it was not uncommon for children to be violently seized and raped, but fortunately a large proportion of sexual assaults against little girls were prosecuted by civil authorities, unlike most of the cases of adult women. On the other hand, some young women tried to escape the destiny imposed by their families, raising their voice in front of a court. Eventually, although battered young women would get to speak for themselves, most of them were silenced. (Show less)

Fed up with the physical and psychological abuse perpetrated by her husband, the Countess of Prades, Sança Ximenis d’Arenós, whilst at her son’s wedding took this opportunity to leave her house and take refuge at the family’s estate. For some years the noble woman counted on the protection of her firstborn, but after his death in 1395, the Count intensified the tone of his threats by making continuous demands for her to come back to him. Pressure and fear reached such point that Sança felt obliged to move to Valencia and search the protection of Franciscan nuns. She chose to build her new home within the land of the convent where she resided up to her death in 1416. During those years, the Countess got special protection from the King and the influential Franciscan theorist Francesc Eiximenis dedicated his Llibre de les Dones to her, a work of great prestige and reach in which he defends the possibility of divorce in the event that women have been the object of assault by their husbands and providing their children are of legal age. None of that was of any use to kill off the ambition of the Count who even took it upon himself to travel to Valencia with the goal of kidnapping his spouse. In the same way, the Count reached an agreement during the course of the Interregnum (1410-1412) with the Castillian candidate to the throne of the Crown of Aragon who would then become his supporter if, with the help of arms, managed to return his wife to him; something he never managed to achieve.
By analysing different types of documents, such as letters, procedures of Corts and Parliaments, chancillery registers and an extensive judicial process in which several witnesses very knowledgeable about the case testified, we endeavour to make known the example of a woman who, with great courage, chose to confront marital violence, coming out victorious after overcoming multiple adversities. (Show less)

The sexual harassment, the sexual abuse and the sexual aggression against men have been residual throughout history. Nevertheless, these actions have been even normalized when the victim was a woman. The sources not show the first and second of these actions. Only the sexual aggression appears in the medieval documents, but only a small part of them because this kind of aggressions must have been reported.
Women who informed against these actions were hardly any because the chastity, good renown and the family honour be able to be harm if the violation was known in the town or city, but there were courageous women or fathers or uncles who informed to the authorities against the rapist. Because of these, we are able to prepare patterns that help us to understand which type of women were the habitual victim, which type of men were the habitual aggressor, in which spaces the crimes were perpetrated more usually and other issues that serve to analyse all sequences and to study sexual violence in Late Medieval Castilian Crown.
In this way, I hope that this oral communication can be used to understand the special dynamics about sexual violence in the different crown zones of the Catholics Monarchs. Especially, we will observe the main differences that the sexual aggressions had in north and south of this kingdom between 1480-1510. (Show less)