Gender and illicit speech. Insults and urban politics in late medieval Brabant

This paper revalorizes women’s protest and popular political ideas in history. Firstly, it argues that female participation was more common in political conflicts than historians have previously thought. Until this day, the historiography on medieval social upheaval has mainly focused on violent revolts, led by men who rallied against oppressing authorities. This paper, though not denying that women were almost absent in these conflicts, claims that historians have studied the wrong forms of protest for analyzing the agency of women. A case-study on the Low Countries will therefore show that not only men, but also women were active when it came to spreading subversive ideas, undermining the authority of urban governors, mobilizing discontent, etcetera. Secondly, a comparison between the 'illicit speech' of both sexes will show whether women's role in sustaining and spreading political beliefs can be called essential. The close reading of the words and expressions used by both male and female insurgents will not only enable us to determine if there is a difference between women's and men's political thought, but above all, it will inform us on popular ideas on urban politics. Records of repression of three towns in Brabant (Leuven, Antwerp and Mechelen) dating from the fourteenth until the sixteenth century will therefore be studied with the aim to demonstrate that common (wo)men permanently strove for changing the governmental practices in towns.