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She is grateful to the “Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice, c.1100–c.1750” Project at Swansea University, particularly to Deborah Youngs, Emma Cavell, and Teresa Phipps, who invited the author to participate in a workshop in June of 2017, where she presented a preliminary version of this article. She presented a different version of this article also at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium in April of 2018, where it received the Susan J. Ridyard Prize. The author also thanks Fiona Harris-Stoertz and Sara McDougall for reading drafts along the way and providing helpful comments. Finally, the author expresses enormous gratitude to Gautham Rao and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their editorial suggestions and for helping her to craft a more effective final product.
[email protected]With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of unity of person saw a wife's legal personality merge into her husband's; he assumed the responsibility for representing them both at law. A married woman was a lawful dependent; the only time she appeared as plaintiff in a civil suit was when she stood in as attorney for her husband. The single woman (a category that includes also the feme sole, a married woman whom the law treated as single for business purposes) was the exception to the rule: the courts acceded to her full legal personhood. She was capable of representing herself at law, although that concession existed more in theory than in practice. Success at law for a woman usually entailed suing jointly with a man.1 In terms of putting forward a criminal accusation, a woman's agency was not tied as closely to her marital status. All women were prohibited from enjoying independent legal personhood. Common law formally endorsed what is known as “the limiting rule,” authorizing a woman to accuse only when her suit involved personal injury (such as rape, or assault causing a miscarriage), or the murder of her husband, with some provision that he perished...