Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300

[Ferran]

Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300

Heath Dillard



Introduction

[1] Historians tend to overlook the vital participation of women in the shaping of Hispanic society during the Reconquest and the medieval expansion of Christian 'Spain'. Beginning in the ninth century many women joined with men to forge new lives in the frontier districts of the peninsular kingdoms near citadels strategic for the defence and radiation of colonial settlement in war-torn and abandoned territory. Together they moved southward from the Cantabrian Mountains and Pyrenees to the Sierra Nevada to found and enlarge outposts of new population in the wake of the often unsteady push into Muslim Al-Andalus. In León and Castile, permanently united in 1230, women in partnership with men advanced the growth of captured fortresses and small communities as these developed, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into highly privileged and largely self-governing municipalities of several thousand inhabitants. Settlements evolved early to consist of a fortified urban core (the villa, cuerpo de la villa) around a castle stronghold and a large, sometimes extensive, outlying rural landscape (the alfoz or término) of common lands, waste and scattered dependent villages. There were hundreds of these communities whose security, permanence and welfare became increasingly essential to stabilize the conquest. Women, no less than the men who seized, defended and governed these towns, prospered here and were instrumental in transforming uninhabited places and formerly Muslim sites into centres where Christian institutions put down new and lasting roots. This book is about the pioneering women who migrated to brand-new settlements and their daughters who inhabited the flourishing towns of León and Castile during the last two centuries of the medieval Reconquest, roughly between the capture of Toledo in 1085 and the last quarter of the thirteenth century.

Castilian townswomen, like most ordinary European women of the [2] twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were inarticulate from the standpoint of literary documentation and remain for the most part anonymous. Extremely little was written by or exclusively for or about them before the fourteenth century. We are fortunate, however, to possess a body of extensive if scattered materials about townswomen in numerous settlement charters and detailed codes of customary law from both fledgling settlements and prospering municipalities. These documents have often been used by historians and legal experts to describe political, juridical and economic institutions in the kingdom, but their exceptionally rich and highly diverse references to women have not yet received the attention they deserve. This is lamentable, especially since the sources plainly disclose the interest of the topic for the founders of towns and the citizens who compiled them. A municipality attracted a changing cast of characters, depending upon settlers' origins, the era of its founding, and its relative age and level of development. This was no less true of female than male inhabitants, and we shall meet many different kinds of women under a wide variety of circumstances.

The majority of townswomen were laywomen, not those in religious orders. Occasionally we shall observe aristocratic women who owned property in towns, but most of these resided within a few large cities and on landed estates outside the boundaries of privileged townships. While a majority of townswomen were Christians, many towns sheltered significant minorities of Jews and free Muslims who, inseparably bound with Christian citizens by the laws and customs of their town, also had to obey the religious law of their respective communities and special edicts of the crown which protected them. There were Muslim slavewomen as well, and other female servants employed by upper-class townswomen who were less frequently noble ladies than women with aristocratic tastes and pretensions. We shall encounter numerous housewives, mothers and stepmothers, but also mistresses and unwed mothers. Many were working women, although not always in honest trades. Some, whether they lived in town or in a village in the alfoz, engaged primarily in agricultural pursuits in the rural parts of their township since many Reconquest towns preserved their distinctively agrarian character as market centres for produce and, most particularly, sheep and cattle. Other townswomen were more typically full-time urban dwellers who found occupations inside the walls. We shall meet damsels, some in distress, but also young and elderly widows. Headstrong and unruly women were [3] conspicuously present, unlike the more disreputable or even despicable types who tended to mask their activities and identities.

The sources reveal, both directly and indirectly, how women supported themselves or were supported and some of the ways they spent their money. The kinds of property women owned and how they obtained it were of vital concern to townsmen, and there is a myriad of detail about the rights of women, both as family members and citizens, within the legal system of municipal justice. The ways in which women behaved and misbehaved in public and private attracted attention, and it was necessary to take appropriate action when they got out of line. How they treated and mistreated one another was not without interest, nor was the abuse of townswomen by men a matter to be taken lightly. A woman's relations with her husband, children and other relatives were subjects of importance, as were her living arrangements, the tasks of infant and child care and her involvement in the details of domestic life. Women of course figured prominently in such matters as courtship, wedding plans, marriages and other less formal connections between the sexes, and they buried and mourned their dead with other women and the men of their town. Their social life and the ways they spent free time were also noteworthy topics. We do not always obtain the same kinds of information from every town, and in many cases we are told just enough to provoke questions which are left unanswered. This body of sources from many different communities raises a host of interpretive problems, but it furnishes a starting point for the study of medieval women during the key centuries of expansion when the foundations of Castilian society were established.

Throughout the Reconquest the most numerous and important towns were royal foundations, and their customs were formulated, confirmed and modified by or with the approval of successive monarchs. Some communities were populated by and remained under the jurisdiction of nobles and religious corporations, but kings at times intervened in disputes between seignorial lords and their townsmen and helped formulate compromises which these towns incorporated into local practice. In some municipalities chance has preserved both a settlement charter (forum, carta puebla) for the original inhabitants and an elaborate extensive customary code (fuero extenso) compiled at a later date for their descendants and newcomers. The short municipal fori or fueros, beginning in the tenth century but extending into the thirteenth, usually contain no more than fifty or [4] sixty provisions, while the fuller fueros extensos of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries sometimes run to nearly a thousand. The earliest fueros are similar to other settlement charters from rural or semi-rural communities in setting forth the obligations of colonizers to a landlord, but the municipal fueros contain notable privileges, exemptions and norms of customary law about criminal and procedural matters. Those of the eleventh and twelfth centuries incorporate also concessions and mandates dictated by the king and laws derived from exemplary judicial decisions (fazañas). These were new legal precedents derived from judgments in local or regional trouble cases whose participants, male and female, were sometimes remembered in later fueros or in separate collections of fazañas. Such local and regional case law provided concrete abstractions from life and formed the basis of many of the distinctive customs recorded in the fueros extensos which began to appear in the second half of the twelfth century, issuing from relatively large towns of several thousand inhabitants, which flourished in the hinterlands of the battle zones.

As royal and seignorial officials and, increasingly, townsmen themselves compiled their fueros extensos, they incorporated any carta puebla, distinctive subsequent privileges and obligations, royal decrees, judicial norms and customs of the place, and many other new provisions. Sometimes they took over customs from other towns in the same region or even beyond it. These compilations were then confirmed by the king or lord and later reconfirmed and augmented by subsequent rulers. This complex process of redaction and the texts it produced were highly diverse and spanned the reigns of many monarchs, extending beyond the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 into the reigns of Fernando III and Alfonso X, who completed the conquests of Andalusia and Murcia. Some fueros were recopied and amended for use thereafter, but the most intensive period of composition and redaction coincided with the last two centuries of the medieval Reconquest, before the introduction of Alfonso X's Fuero Real (1256) for the towns, the first of his many codes culminating in the Siete Partidas. Royal justice, with its strong emphasis on Roman, canon and even Visigothic law, penetrated the kingdom very gradually, often in contradiction to local custom. Alfonso's uniform municipal code commenced slowly and sporadically to supplement the local fueros in the second half of the thirteenth century, but it was only in the next, beginning in the reign of Alfonso XI, that municipal institutions were effectively reorganized and that a more uniform [5] municipal regime dictated by the king and supplemented by the royal codes began to supplant the privileges and public law embodied in the fueros. Many of their distinctive local customs had an even longer life, however, persisting in the form of town ordinances or conventional practices in individual towns.

Surviving manuscripts of fueros extensos include much older usages than those said to be observed at the time of copying. Some customs can be traced back to short fueros of earlier times and towns; to regional customs from Old Castile, written down in the mid-thirteenth century; to terminology and concepts derived from Roman or canonical principles; and to Visigothic law. The last was most influential in the Kingdom of León north of the Duero, at Toledo and in the New Castile of the Tagus Valley, and later in Andalusia and Murcia where the monarchy introduced the Fuero Juzgo, the thirteenth-century translation of the Visigothic Liber Judiciorum. Some fueros, especially the more elaborate codes, fall into groups or 'families' whose interrelationships have been studied and are still debated among legal historians. Notably important is the so-called Cuenca family, thought by Rafael Ureña to have originated about 1190 in the town of that name but widely used elsewhere. These customs, assembling usages extensively practised in the Castilian Extremadura and neighbouring districts of Aragon, were later adopted and adapted as far away as Plasencia, Béjar and, in exceedingly modified form, at Coria and other Leonese Extremaduran towns far to the west. Other families of fueros, such as those of Logroño, Sahagún or León, had more distinctly regional application, while the customs of the important and exceptionally large city of Toledo became widely influential, together with the Fuero Juzgo, in Córdoba, Seville and most of Andalusia. Yet other fueros, such as those of Salamanca and Zamora in León or Alcalá de Henares and Guadalajara in New Castile, although not lacking reference to customs elsewhere, are highly original and show evidence of having been revised or compiled piecemeal, with provisions added as necessary to meet specific situations and local requirements.(1)

The diversity and increasingly comprehensive nature of the municipal fueros can be traced to the special conditions of the Reconquest, the gradual settlement of formerly Muslim territories and the changing needs of growing communities. Circumstances demanded fresh approaches to the organization of municipalities. Town populations of diffuse origin settled at various times in many [6] different regions, each of which possessed its own special opportunities and limitations but lacked initially an ancient tradition or body of recognized customs. The towns acquired their widely celebrated liberties as a result of their usefulness to rulers in colonial settlement, military policy, territorial stability, fiscal support and, in some regions, commercial development. The hazards of endemic warfare and new Muslim invasions encouraged the growth of autonomy in many towns, especially in the territories between the Duero and Guadiana rivers. Castilian townsmen in particular gained prerogatives to adopt new legal principles based on the decisions of local justices and to regulate their internal affairs themselves. The separation of León and Castile from 1157 to 1230 and persistent hostilities with Portugal, Navarre and the Crown of Aragon, from which comparable but fewer municipal fueros survive, accelerated the process of innovation at the local level. Townsmen worked out in detail, but with royal or seignorial approval, their own methods for dealing with community problems. Their diverse solutions find expression in the distinctive local customs they recorded in their fueros, especially on matters of general interest which transcended strictly public policy.

The subjects regulated by a fuero differ over time as well as from place to place. Some concerns were immediately pertinent at a new town while others arose at prospering municipalities years after the original settlement. A fuero extenso of about 1200 characteristically included a vast amount of detail about municipal institutions, especially the selection and duties of its leading officials and their subordinates; meetings of the town assembly of property owners and the local court; the market with its essential functions and special problems; local defence and the militia which left periodically with units of soldiers, guides, medics and equipment to campaign for the king, and then returned with captives and other spoils, or the wounded and dead. The fueros are highly informative about the public and fiscal responsibilities of town residents, and they define limitations on royal or seignorial officials and outside bullies, especially members of the nobility who tried to interfere in the internal affairs of townsmen. Just as numerous are provisions of penal law, the sort that begin, 'If any man, or woman, commits...' Notably prominent are regulations concerning the equal protection of the law for all citizens, great and small, and their access to the community's natural resources, including grazing lands, water [7] sources, mines and forests: all were subject to strict surveillance. Townsmen enacted planning and zoning ordinances about settlement, land division and the construction and use of fortifications, streets, plazas, mills, livestock corrals, dwellings and many other man-made structures in a town and its surrounding countryside. The citizens were keenly interested in all kinds of real and movable goods, and they regulated meticulously the many transactions affecting the disposition and use of property, from inheritance and sale to damage, destruction and debt. They set down rules concerning their occupations and the ways they worked the land, raised animals and crops, and produced articles for sale to one another and outside their town. Within and beneath all these major topics of interest, the fueros describe or simply reveal in passing a wealth of detail about a town's inhabitants and visitors; how they spent their time; what they ate and wore; how they celebrated holidays and seasonal events; whom they admired or abhorred; whom they trusted or feared; and the prevailing attitudes and conventions which guided their conduct and relations with one another. At times such concerns extended most particularly to the women of a town.

It must be emphasized that the fueros are instruments for organizing and governing stable and peaceful settlements and therefore manifest the purposes of founders, kings and town governments to build communities of permanent and responsible inhabitants. A thriving town, however, attracted passing strangers, expectant but uncommitted immigrants on the move, and an array of unwanted and downright dangerous persons of both sexes. To all these people and to permanent residents the fueros' universal but tacit message was, 'This is the way we do things here.' The fueros therefore recorded formal proclamations and announcements about how orderly and neighbourly relations should be conducted within a highly diverse and fluid citizenry. At times it is plain that the relative age or maturity of a settlement, rather than the calendar date of its foundation, determined local priorities and the kinds of problems communities faced. Townspeople dealt repeatedly over generations with concrete questions requiring answers, and these tended to take the form of pragmatic solutions rather than purely high principled and hortatory decrees. The solutions preserved nevertheless in their deliberate regulation much that townsmen took for granted in the way of underlying custom, habit, the fruits of experience and conventional wisdom gained over decades of organizing and governing [8] new communities. These underlying assumptions embraced mental attitudes, cultural baggage and the developing ideology of the reconquistadores. We shall see how their vision of the world as well as explicit policy decisions affected women in the towns.

The fueros serve as windows, partly screened, opening into medieval townships. The texts are highly descriptive but also prescriptive sources and thus demand caution and impose limitations which at present cannot be surmounted entirely by consulting other documents. The royal archives have not survived from the Middle Ages, and there are scarcely any sizeable collections of municipal records from this period. The exceptional town archives which do contain documents dating back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have yielded few materials of any quantitative significance, especially municipal court records or notarial acta, which might show the extent to which the lives of women of flesh and blood conformed to the patterns indicated in a town's fueros. Private charters and other types of secular and ecclesiastical sources sometimes clear up uncertainties on matters of detail, but it has not been possible always to test local prescriptions against immediate and specific situations in a particular town's history. Additional materials have been used extensively to supplement the fueros, including iconographical sources, the most valuable of which are the scenes of ordinary women in illuminated manuscripts of Alfonso X's mid-thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa María. Many of these depict women in situations described in the fueros, and some of these pictures accompany the text here.(2) Likely discrepancies between law and practice, however, pose persistent problems. When did new legal principles intend to change local practice by introducing innovations? When were new customs adopted to promote, hinder or steer changes that were already moving in a certain direction? Here comparative passages from other fueros are sometimes helpful, or another kind of source will indicate an answer, but a good deal of uncertainty still remains about the direction and pace of change on a variety of matters, owing again to the fact that we do not have the kinds of records that would resolve the issues. Notably lacking are documents which would permit numerically significant statements about Castilian women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is important to keep these problems of law and practice clearly in view since concise legal solutions screen the complexities of experience. Nevertheless, the large number of surviving fueros, their precision, their diversity of location and revealing [9] variations in detail and language within families of texts provide a body of aggregate materials which partly compensate for the neatness of any law code's smooth and orderly 'oughts' and 'ought nots'. Certainly the fueros lack an authentic female voice. This absence, however, is not an insurmountable obstacle in obtaining from them reasonably accurate reports about townswomen, but we should avoid the assumption that women lived exactly as men thought they should, or even did.

Eileen Power's seminal survey about medieval women in England and France remains the best general introduction to the subject, but new research continues to forge ahead using widely differing source materials and probing familiar ones in new ways. Suzanne Wemple's recent study of early Frankish and Carolingian women provides an important synthesis for the earlier Middle Ages in an era and region whose documentation, always subject to new interpretation but not to appreciably new source discoveries, lends itself more readily to summation than records from later times.(3) K. J. Leyser's work on tenth- and eleventh-century Saxon women of the aristocracy exemplifies the kind of research which has been uncovering the important contributions made by powerful women to the development of medieval secular and ecclesiastical institutions.(4) Commercial instruments, wills, dowry contracts and population surveys are permitting analysis of family organization, households, marriage practices and vital statistics about the life cycle, all important for the study of women and particularly rewarding for researchers in documentary-rich Italy of the central and later Middle Ages.(5) English records continue to point social historians in new directions in terms of source materials, particular localities, special problems and groups of women, notably from the fourteenth century onward.(6) Modern scholarship questions old stereotypes of female passivity and irrelevance, rampant misogyny and other commonplace negative generalities about medieval women, which no longer hold up under the scrutiny of many pioneering investigators employing a broad range of traditional and innovative approaches to the study of many different individuals and groups of women in the Middle Ages. It is becoming increasingly clear that their lives varied exceedingly depending upon their epoch, geographical situation and social class and that most categorical assessments of 'the position of women' as a whole are generally subject to important reservations. Clear-cut and neatly progressive trends in the changing status of women from one [10] century to the next, such as might be hospitable to ideological theorists, have often proved to be conceptually misleading in evaluating both new and old evidence. The attention and important research being devoted to outstanding individuals, women as family members, special classes of women, communities of female religious, and other groups in many different walks of life are significant and promising, but it is as yet too soon to synthesize recent findings about ordinary European women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries into a satisfactory 'model' against which to measure the Castilian case. Moreover, models and smooth generalities seem now to be among the least convincing and desirable objectives of new scholarship. Signposts are a different matter, and the present study will perhaps contribute to the on-going discovery.

Among the handful of serious works on medieval women of the Iberian Peninsula, biographical studies of prominent persons and those by literary historians are the most numerous. The poetry and chronicles, not excluding the latters' essentially fictional passages, certainly suggest the vigour and independence of royal and aristocratic women, characteristics which Strabo found remarkable and shocking in Iberian women of the first century B.C. The Cid's wife Jimena, largely a legendary figure, is remembered favourably as her husband's dependable companion and, when his widow, for her own defence of Valencia.(7) At the other extreme, the twelfth-century Queen Urraca, whose reign is the subject of Bernard Reilly's new book, is counted an ambitious and irascible monarch whose political designs and contentious second marriage to Alfonso I of Aragon provoked unsparing and, it would seem, undeserved criticism among the writers of her day.(8) Quite a few mighty and illustrious women merit further study as significant leaders in the political and religious life of medieval Castile, but a note of caution is in order about general works devoted to Hispanic women of the age. A common theme is the contrast between the high-minded and active Christian helpmate and the voluptuous harem dweller of Al-Andalus, a woman often depicted as sitting or lying around on cushions.(9) Spanish writers, living and dead, have not been immune to the European mythology of an Islamic paradise peopled by seductive Arab slave girls, a fantasy that goes back at least to the twelfth century. Studies which juxtapose Christian and Muslim women usually imply, when they do not explicitly state, that the success of the Reconquest may be attributed in part to the weakness of Muslims effeminized by the harem. Such [11] doubtful generalities by modern writers, who seem to overlook the remarkable and enduring resilience of the allegedly effete enemy, should be as suspect as the polarized 'pedestal and stake' view which, as Power observed years ago, is misleadingly characteristic of much, medieval writing about women.(10)

The fueros draw our attention to many different groups and types of women. The present study makes no attempt to isolate them from the basic structures of the communities they shared with men. On the contrary, it follows an arrangement designed to reckon with fundamental municipal institutions, particularly as regards the formal organization, procedures and social structure which determined a townswoman's practical concerns and shaped her interpersonal relationships and attachments. For a comprehensive view it is necessary to take into account different traditions, habits and populations. At times regional comparisons will be useful in revealing the position of women in a particular situation. A unique and exceptional custom recorded at one place can be more informative than the common body of practices that characterized a region or family of fueros. Thus, while I shall synthesize related but dissimilar and widely dispersed materials to present a broader picture of medieval townswomen than can be gleaned from any single locality, I shall also attempt to preserve the rich detail which characterizes the fueros' treatment of women in a variety of circumstances. Following a chapter which introduces the townswomen of the Reconquest, come three chapters on significant phases of a woman's private life. These take stock of important variables in family status and women's relations with their male and female kin. The four remaining chapters are devoted to more thematic topics and consider townswomen in their dealings with one another and the male citizenry. This arrangement will permit us to consider them as integral members of their communities, and it will, I hope, suggest directions for further research. I have attempted, above all, to probe matters of importance to townswomen. These daughters of the Reconquest were women of many stripes. It was they, among all the soldiers, stockmen, priests and other leading men of a town, who animated the municipalities of medieval Castile, and they can, in turn, help bring these communities to life for us. I dare to hope that this book will be useful, not only to Hispanists and those who study the history of women, but also to readers with a more general interest in social history and the development of medieval societies.

Notes on Introduction

1. A. García Gallo, 'Aportación al estudio de los fueros', AHDE 26 (1956), 387-446; R. Gilbert, 'El derecho municipal de León y Castilla', AHDE 31 (1961), 695-753.

2. From Escorial ms T.I.1, printed in facsimile reproduction, El 'Códice Rico' de las Cantigas de Santa María (2 vols., Madrid, 1979); black and white, J. Guerrero Lovillo, Las Cantigas, Estudio arquelógico de sus miniaturas (Madrid, 1949); texts ed. W. Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María (4 vols., Coimbra, 1959-72).

3. Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge, 1975). Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the cloister, 500-900 (Philadelphia, 1981).

4. Leyser, Rule and conflict in an early medieval society: Ottonian Saxony (Bloomington and London, 1979), pp. 49-73; and e.g., A. R. Lewis, The development of southern French and Catalan society, 718-1050 (Austin, 1965); P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne au milieu de Xe à la fin du XIe siècle (2 vols., Toulouse, 1975-6); Women in medieval society, ed. Susan M. Stuard (Philadelphia, 1976).

5. E.g., D. Herlihy, 'Veillir à Florence au Quattrocento', Annales, E.S.C. 24 (1969), 1338-52, repr. in Cities and society in medieval Italy (London, 1980); S. Chojnacki, 'Patrician women in early renaissance Venice', Studies in Renaissance 21 (1974), 176-203.

6. E.g., B. A. Hanawalt, 'The female felon in fourteenth century England', Viator 5 (1974), 253-68, repr. in Women, ed. Stuard, pp. 125-40; R. H. Hilton, The English peasantry in the later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 95-110.

7. The geography of Strabo, ed. H. L. Jones, Loeb Classical Library (8 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1923), vol. 2, pp. 72-9, 106-15. The best of the literary studies is that of C. V. Aubrun, 'La femme de moyen âge en Espagne', Histoire mondiale de la femme, ed. P. Grimal, vol. 2: L'Occident des Celtes à la Renaissance (Paris, 1966), pp. 185-210.

8. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109-1126 (Princeton, 1982). For biographical approaches, see, e.g., L. García Calles, Doña Sancha, hermana del Emperador (León and Barcelona, 1972); and J. Uría Riú, Doña Velasquita Giráldez y la burguesía oventence del siglo XIII (Oviedo, 1961).

9. C. Sánchez Albornoz, 'La mujer en España hace mil anos', España y el Islam (Buenos Aires, 1943), pp. 38-141, repr. in Del ayer de España, Trípticos históricos (Madrid, 1973), pp. 91-117; L.G. Linares, Historia ilustrada de la mujer, ed. G. Truc (2 vols., Madrid, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 230-41. But cf. E. lévi-Provençal, L'Espagne musulmane au Xe siècle: Institutions et vie sociale (Paris, n.d.), pp. 53-5, 59, 81, 161-2, 191-2, 226, 234; and L. Gonzalvo, La mujer musulmana en España (Madrid, 1906). Short treatments of legal status appear in A. García Ulecia, Los factores de diferenciación entre las personas en los fueros de la Extremadura castellano-aragonesa (Sevilla, 1975), pp. 255-80; M. T. Gacto Fernández, Estructura de la población de la Extremadura leonesa en los siglos XII y XIII, Estudio de los grupos socio-jurídicos, a través de los fueros de Salamance, Ledesma, Alba de Tormes y Zamora (Salamanca, 1977), pp. 68-9. Consult now Las Mujeres medievales y su ámbito jurídico, Actas de las II Jornadas de Investigació Interdisciplinaria (Madrid, 1983).

10. N. Daniel, Islam and the West, The making of an image (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 135-61. E. W. Monter, 'Pedestal and stake, Courtly love and witchcraft', Becoming visible: Women in European history, ed. R. Bridenthal and C. Koontz (Boston, 1971), pp. 119-36.

CONTENTS

Chapter One : Townswomen and the medieval settlement of Castile

Chapter Two : Brides, weddings and the bonds of matrimony

Chapter Three : Wives, husbands and the conjugal household

Chapter Four : Widows of the Reconquest, a numerous class

Chapter Five : On the margins: mistresses and abducted wives

Chapter Six : The daily round: activities and occupations

Chapter Seven : In defense of feminine honour: the shield of municipal law

Chapter Eight : Women without honour: harlots, procuresses, sorceresses and other transgressors

Conclusion : Medieval Castilian townswomen



Source: http://libro.uca.edu/dillard/daughters.htm