Season 1, Episode 49

Return to episodes list

Violant writes follow-up letters to the officials of Montpellier and the Bishop of Maguelone about the students accused of rape in Montpellier.

Today’s Document

• Subject: Montpellier sexual assault case
• Date: February 11, 1387
• Day of the Week: Monday
• Language: Catalan and Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1819 f82r-v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: Officials of Montpellier and Bishop of Maguelone

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: it is clear that the officials of Montpellier have not complied with the requests from Violant and Joan; we have no indication that the Duc de Berry decided to use his influence to gain the release of the accused rapists; now that Violant has been queen for over a month, she might now feel further emboldened to use her influence to get the son of her treasury official released from imprisonment in Montpellier; another possible interpretation of purpose is that if we want to be very generous to Violant, we can suppose that these letters are not actually intended to succeed but are composed only as a courtesy to Ramon de Soler

• Contextualization: the same contextualization applies to this document as the one from Epiode 9; in the patriarchy that developed in Western Civilization, sexual assault appears constantly (for example, just look at its prevalence in Greek myths); in ancient times, the Middle Ages, and in our modern era, powerful men use their influence to protect perpetrators and the rapists benefit from a default characterization of being ‘young men with a bright future ahead of them’; in an excellent recent monograph, Carissa Harris has exposed the cultural underpinnings of sexual assault for England in the Middle Ages ¹; I think that this is an instance when continuity surfaces, but at the same time it’s important to understand that patriarchy and sexual assault are not inevitable or a natural background feature of human societies - both are defined within the boundaries of gender rules of the time; the context for this February 11th document also brings up the difficulties in exercising power, given that distant cities had developed several strategies to circumvent royal authority, taking advantage of the state’s lack of enforcement personnel - Benjamin Gampel demonstrated this in the case of the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391 in which municipalities circumvented the orders issued by Joan, Violant and Martí to halt the violence

• Corroboration: this document returns to the subject of earlier letters examined in Episode 1 and Episode 9; we can assess more about the meaning of certain phrases in this document and is overall impact if we have additional letters from Joan or if we can find out of the Duc de Berry took action after receiving Joan’s letter of January 2nd; it would also be extremely helpful to find reference to this case in any archival collections for Montpellier at this time

• Close-Reading: the fourth line of the Latin letter on f87v contains a phrase that could imply that Violant considers the charges against the students to be false charges, since occasione could be translated as ‘pretext’; none of the three documents acknowledges the failure of the earlier effort to get the rapists released from imprisonment

What is this document doing?

• This document makes a further attempt to activate political influence to alter the outcome of a criminal proceeding.
• The document also responds to a failure of earlier efforts to exert that influence.

Questions

• How did the officials of Montpellier plan their strategy to circumvent or ignore the influence campaign from the Crown of Aragon to release the imprisoned rapists?
• Did Ramon de Soler, the father of one of the rapists, still work for Violant or Joan at this time?
• Was Violant attempting to get the jurisdiction changed from the municpality of Montpellier to the ecclesiastical authority of the Bishop of Maguelone?
• Had the Duc de Berry also pressured the officials in Montpellier after receiving Joan’s letter of January 2nd?
• Did Violant acknowledge the criminality of the rapists? If so, how did she morally justify her attempts to ease their punishment?
• Are there documents from Joan in early February on this topic?
• Would the Bishop of Maguelone want to take over jurisdiction for this case?

AI Usage

I used ChatGPT to attempt to sort through some of the difficult Latin and in the hopes of identifying some subtleties in the medieval Catalan.

Bibliography

• Block, Sharon. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
• Gampel, Benjamin R. Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Harris, Carissa M. Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Cornell University Press, 2018.

← return to episode list