Season 1, Episode 12

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Joan makes a ruling on a petition sent to him regarding a financial dispute connected to a dowry. Franescha, he wife of Guillermi, is in a dispute with Bernardo and Pedro.

Today’s Document

• Subject: Joan rules on a petition
• Date: January 5, 1387
• Day of the Week: Saturday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1786 f259v-260v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Girona, ostensibly
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: petitioners

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: the exact details of this document’s creation are fraught due to conflicting evidence about Joan’s location on January 5th; nevertheless the document acts as an official ruling on a petition from a family in Girona

• Contextualization: Marie A. Kelleher has shown that women made use of the legal system in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon in ways that could manipulate a patriarchical system in their favor ¹

• Corroboration: I do not have much experience reading rulings on petitions and I would need to look through some other cases, such as those cited in Kelleher’s work, to better understand how this document fits into overall patterns of familial disputes in the legal system of the Crown of Aragon

• Close-Reading: It is possible that Joan ruled on this petition verbally in Girona and it took longer for the chancery staff to write it up in formal legal prose, only completing the document after Joan had left; the hard-to-read notation at the bottom of f260r might be an indication of this

What is this document doing?

• This document re-enacts and reinforces Joan’s position at the top of the legal system in Girona
• The document also reflects a social reality that disputes between men and women frequently entered the legal system as opposed to patriarchical norms automatically defeating a woman’s claim in a dispute

Questions

• What was the dispute really about? Who were the claimnants?
• How did Joan rule on this petition during a period of intensity as he prepared for succession?
• Why did chancery staff members date this ruling on January 5th in Girona when Joan was not in Girona on that day?
• What does the inaccurate dating and location statement of this document say regarding the notorial practices of the chancery in general? Or was this exceptional for some reason?

Bibliography

• Kelleher, Marie A. The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
• Kelleher, Marie A. “What Do We Mean by” Women and Power”?” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 51, no. 2 (2016): 104–15.
• Kelleher, Marie A. The Hungry City: A Year in the Life of Medieval Barcelona. Cornell University Press, 2024.

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