ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Domestic Violence, Good Governance and the Downsides of Litigation in Late Medieval Marseille

This paper will examine court cases and records of criminal convictions from late medieval Marseille and will argue that violence was a tool to be deployed sparingly within the home. While custom and statutory law recognized a man’s right to physically chastise members of his household, that right was limited and exercising it could backfire.  Violence between husbands and wives has received the bulk of scholarly attention under the rubric of domestic violence.  Recently Sara Butler has argued that men’s ability to deploy violence within their household was intertwined with their reputations as good and honorable husbands.  This argument serves as an important reminder that medieval standards for necessary and acceptable violence are quite different from the modern. It is useful, too, to expand the definition of domestic violence beyond the dynamic between wives and husbands to ask who else is involved in these putatively domestic relations? Certainly domestic violence in the middle ages was not a private affair. This essay will examine the multiplicity of perpetrators of violence that took place within the home: husbands and wives, but also parents, in-laws, and servants. It will ask when neighbors and bystanders got involved, and when they stayed away. Finally, it will attempt to query how the violence worked- if husbands needed to deploy violence strategically to assert their mastery of their home, what happened when that violence went too far?