Fighting with words and deeds. Women before Bologna's early modern criminal court

The past decades scholars have increasingly begun questioning persistent stereotypes regarding women’s lack of autonomy as protagonists in criminal transgressions. For women the focus has above all been on the verbal assaults that provided major informal means to influence or shape public opinion in a society in which men controlled all formal domains. In conducting the small politics of daily life in early modern communities, it is traditionally suggested that women primarily relied on insults that drew on a ritualized and heavily gendered vocabulary of vilification.  But although verbal aggression is generally deemed the typical form of ‘female violence’, criminal court proceedings show that it was only one of the tools in the kit.

This paper therefore examines in detail three pivotal means that women had at their disposal in the negotiation of everyday interpersonal conflicts: verbal aggression, physical violence and litigation. Through an examination of the court records from Bologna’s early modern criminal court, it will examine the importance of these often entangled means, and women’s agency in employing them. This paper will argue that women, like men, were not only able to use injurious words and violent deeds, but that they were also increasingly able to strategically interweave judicial instruments in their repertoire in their bid for justice.