Women and Violence in the Late Medieval Mediterranean, ca. 1100-1500

This pioneering work explores the theme of women and violence in the late medieval Mediterranean, bringing together medievalists of different specialties and methodologies to offer readers an updated outline of how different disciplines can contribute to the study of gender-based violence in medieval times.Building on the contributions of the social sciences, and in particular feminist criminology, the book analyses the rich theme of women and violence in its full spectrum, including both violence committed against women and violence perpetrated by women themselves, in order to show how medieval assumptions postulated a tight connection between the two. Violent crime, verbal offences, war and peace-making are among the themes approached by the book, which assesses to what extent coexisting elaborations on the relationship between femininity and violence in the Mediterranean were conflicting or collaborating. Geographical regions explored include Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. This multidisciplinary book will appeal to scholars and students of history, literature, gender studies, and legal studies.

Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Università di Milano Statale. She held research positions in the UK, Canada, and Italy. Her work focuses on the influence of Christian spirituality on the development of criminal justice in the late medieval Italian communes. Lorenzo Caravaggi completed his doctorate at Balliol College, University of Oxford, with a thesis on the dynamics of peacekeeping in late-medieval Italy. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The University of East Anglia, with a project on the ethical and literary underpinnings of criminal law in fourteenth-century Europe. Giulia Maria Paoletti holds an M.St. in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. She was awarded an Ernst Mach Grant to work at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her work focuses on Byzantine poetry, monastic literature and more broadly on the Palaiologan period.