Gendered Punishments in Medieval Nordic Law, ca. 1100–1300

Medieval Nordic law did not always judge men and women in the same way. In the centuries around 1100–1300, written laws addressed offences ranging from homicide and theft to sorcery and sexual misconduct, and the consequences could depend on who had acted, who had been harmed and the relationships involved. Helle Vogt, Mia Korpiola, Else Mundal and Miriam Jensen Tveit compare these legal traditions across the Nordic region.

One of their central questions is whether women were treated as legal actors in their own right or chiefly through the authority of their families. The answers varied, as did the influence of canon law and German town law. Amid rules that could be discriminatory, the authors also trace growing attention to individual responsibility and women’s property rights: a more complicated legal world than a simple division between male privilege and female exclusion.