Judging sexy women in late medieval France

Blindfolded Lady Justice with her scales rarely features in modern representations of medieval European justice. Instead, it is the female sexual sinner bound to the stake for burning who dominates modern imaginings. This reflects a widespread perception of medieval criminal justice as committed to the fierce judicial repression of women, and of women’s sexual activity in particular; an idea that persists in scholarly circles as well as in popular imagination despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. Working primarily from the records of late medieval northern France, this article demonstrates that this idea is in fact a medievalism, a modern imagining about the Middle Ages. It attributes to medieval judicial authorities the disciplining and punishing of female bodies and female sexuality that instead emerged only with modern patriarchies. Heeding this difference allows us to recognise in Medieval Europe a patriarchal darkness of another kind: a world able to maintain stark gender and sexual inequity without any such use of judicial powers.