The general matrix of medieval misogyny was based on women’s corporeal and moral inferiority as opposed to men, and found its ultimate biblical justification in the second version of the Creation (Genesis 2:18–23).1 After shaping [formavit] Adam from the slime of earth, God constructs [aedificavit] Eve from Adam’s rib, and she becomes bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. Despite the existence of the first version (Genesis 1:27), where God creates [creavit] man and woman at the same time and to his image, the second version will position the female from the beginning as a bodily derivate of the male. This inferiority acquires further moral dimension with the Fall (Genesis 3:1–7): the serpent approaches Eve, who will eat from the forbidden fruit and give it to Adam. The female is the one who is responsible for the hardships and sufferings of earthly existence, because of her proneness to transgression and deceit. The widespread dissemination of this second version to all strata of society continued to maintain and reinforce negative stereotypical attitudes toward women in the Middle Ages and beyond.

Russian novels are in intense, ambivalent dialogue with the European tradition; Tolstoy’s take up the British and the French in particular. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reminds us that adultery is an ever-present threat in the British family novel, as it is in the novel of sensation. Like Tolstoy, Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon contrast the dynamics of different marriages. They also set adultery in the context of a system that works against women. In Wood’s East Lynne, Carlyle not only forgives his dying ex-wife, but declines to indict her former lover for murder; as he says, “I leave him to a higher retribution: to One who says ‘Vengeance is mine.’” This quote becomes Tolstoy’s epigraph.

Tolstoy’s works have been adapted into film more often than any other Russian writer except for Dostoevsky. This chapter covers Russian and world cinematic adaptations of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and various shorter works of Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s novels, with their vast length, broad canvas, and complex plots, create unique challenges for prospective filmmakers. While some directors attempt to film his texts as closely as possible, others choose to single out particular aspects of his novels as their foci. Adapters of Anna Karenina, for instance, often focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky’s love affair, while minimizing the plotline involving Levin. Cultural factors often come into play, for instance in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which adapts Tolstoy’s text in light of the Brezhnev-era demand for monumentalism, and for conveying the patriotic aspects of the novel. Shorter works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata have inspired particularly creative approaches, as directors often freely combine Tolstoy’s short narratives with other texts and set them in remarkably different social, historical, and cultural contexts.

Known references to medieval marriage litigation in the kingdom of Castile are very rare, and information about it seems most readily available in the Roman registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary. Based on this testimony, it is possible to conclude that the typology of cases handled in Castilian bishoprics did not depart from what was common experience in church tribunals of the Latin West. At the same time, ecclesiastical control over marriage formation in Castilian society was minimal, and belief in marital consent as the collective concern of families was paramount. In addition, legislation provided support for alternative forms of intimate partnership. Often introduced under the names of barragania and mancebía, they defied sacramental permanence and monogamy by legalizing relations that were temporary and non-exclusive. Local (and Aragonese) notaries also registered service contracts stipulating sexual favors for a period against payment of a dowry. They articulated obligations of cohabitation with clergy in the sacred orders and husbands to a different woman, or they recorded the consensual breakup of couples short of priestly approval. The notarial output is clearly reflective of arrangements that altogether ignored church claims to undiminished jurisdiction over the validity of spousal ties.

delves more deeply into the role of biopolitics in community formation by studying, via criminal court records, how policy makers in practice connected or associated physical health threats to those to morality and social order. The convergence is particularly clear for three themes: poverty, leprosy and sexuality. These topics convey social groups who were each affected by a vision of a healthy, orderly and prosperous community. Policing the common good through targeting these groups was in many ways the same as performing community: it helped constituting civic conduct and moral leadership. Besides accentuating public health as a factor, the aim of this chapter is to show that the same system of reasoning and perception of community shaped attitudes toward each of these groups or issues. This reasoning was for the most part based on a medical, Galenic worldview, which is best summarised by the notion of dynamic balance. Balance can be understood as a tool in biopolitics, and it worked on two levels: the practical and the metaphorical. Analysing these two levels demonstrates how urban authorities integrated the eradication of sin as a part of their program to protect communal health.

Chapter 5 argues that food refusal resonates in the early modern theatre as a gendered mode of resistance. It begins by considering the contemporary phenomenon of 'miraculous maid' pamphlets, which recounted supposedly factual accounts of prodigious acts of religiously motivated food refusal. It then turns to Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) and George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604). It places these plays in the context of changes to religious practice, contemporary understandings of the female body and the space of the household. It argues that in the context of female food refusal, hunger has the capacity to function as a form of parodic obedience to the norms of contemporary gender ideology. By carrying dictates of privacy and closure to a point of often terminal excess, these texts query or satirise the double standard within early modern English society.

Drawing on textual and material evidence, this chapter sketches the topography of different kinds of sex within the built environment of classical Athens. It also examines the role that the social and political structures of the city played in the sex lives of its citizens.

Although Roman criminal law differentiated between male and female offenders, women were not necessarily treated more leniently than men. Female sexual crime especially could be prosecuted in a visible manner and punished severely. This chapter discusses late antique families’ strategies for evading potentially humiliating public criminal process when it came to addressing the wrongdoing of female family members. Always a possibility in the accusatory criminal system of the Roman world, these strategies of evasion became increasingly formalised during late antiquity with the rise of ecclesiastical mediation. Such extrajudicial redress could result in women’s domestic seclusion. Towards the end of antiquity, female confinement was moved from the extrajudicial to the judicial sphere, with the introduction of the penalty of forced residence in a monastery. While forced residence in a monastery was seen as applicable to both male and female offenders, when applied to women it eased the pressures exerted by Roman law’s interference with intimate family affairs. In this way, the monastery became a locus of intersection between small-scale household-based and large-scale state acts of social control.

Marital infidelity was not uncommon in the period covered in this book. Nor was it, for much of the time, a hidden or concealed crime. Newspapers regularly reported on bigamy, criminal conversation, divorce and desertion cases that came before the Irish courts and often involved adulterous behaviour. It is impossible to know how extensive extra-marital sexual behaviour was in any period. In this chapter we explore the attitudes expressed towards adulterous behaviour and couples who cohabited without marrying, how such behaviour reflected upon marital relationships and what it says more generally about sexuality in Irish society. Printed reports and newspaper accounts of trials for criminal conversation were an important medium through which the public became aware of adulterous affairs. This chapter reveals the level of non-conformity that existed in sexual matters amongst individuals and couples over a long time period. Sexual non-conformity can be viewed for instance, in cohabitation, adultery, the keeping of mistresses, and the advantage taken of women servants in households. By the end of the nineteenth century, both the Church and the law increasingly oversaw the implementation of sexual norms in society and perpetuated ideals for male and female sexual behaviour.

This chapter argues that the period is marked by creative legal solutions designed to undermine ecclesiastical control of marital dissolution. The civil courts had begun to consider marriage cases which in 1660 would have been deemed the business of the consistory courts. The canon law prohibition on remarriage after divorce was undermined by private parliamentary acts which dissolved marriages and permitted those involved to remarry. The increasing use of formal and informal private deeds of settlement in which spouses agreed to live apart also weakened strict adherence to church regulations. While these changes did not represent a complete secularisation of Irish marriage law and regulations, they do suggest that men and women were willing to be flexible in their interpretation of church guidelines, particularly when they were considering how to end a problematic union. According to canon law, which guided both the ecclesiastical and civil courts in determining marriage litigation, there were two types of divorce. The first, a vinculo matrimonii (i.e. from the chains of marriage) was, in effect, a judgment that the marriage was null and void because it had never existed in the first place. Far more common in the consistory court and its secular successor were applications for divorce a mensa et thoro or from ‘bed and board’. This was essentially a request for a judicial separation rather than a divorce. Unlike a vinculo matrimonii, a divorce a mensa et thoro did not permit either partner to remarry.

In Northern Ireland, the parliamentary system of divorce, replete with the shortcomings of Westminster’s practice, was introduced as a stopgap measure in 1925. Inherent conservatism and the long-lived reluctance to debate an issue with the potential to deepen the religious divide meant that this system survived in Northern Ireland until 1939. This chapter profiles those who divorced in the Northern Ireland parliament in terms of gender, class, region and religion. It also highlights the continued significance of the Westropp precedent which, with Westminster’s passage of the 1923 Matrimonial Causes Act equalising the grounds for divorce in court, allowed divorce bills in the Northern Ireland parliament to be brought by women solely on the previously male preserve of spousal adultery. This also allowed men to bring bills on the grounds of aggravated adultery such as adultery and desertion. Attitudes regarding the moral issues encircling divorce are also explored as a backdrop to the slow process of moving Northern Irish divorce from parliament to court.

This chapter explores Irish bills for divorce brought to Westminster from 1701 and to the Irish parliament until the Act of Union in 1800. The moral, reputational and financial impact of divorce is considered from a gendered and class-based perspective and noteworthy cases such as that of Sir John Dillon and Lord Abercorn are examined. The profile of the first Irish divorcees in terms of gender, religion, class and grounds for divorce is determined. Moreover, themes of female agency, illegitimacy, collusion, adultery, false testimony (procured in particular from servants) as well as the association between the availability of divorce as an incentive to adultery which became a recurring theme in both clerical and lay debates are also explored in both jurisdictions. The impact of the Act of Union on the rate and profile of Irish divorces is analysed. In addition, the popular criticism and press reportage of Irish divorce allow the tropes of immorality and moral superiority to be defined and considered.

Historians have characterized the prosecution of adultery in early modern Geneva in two different ways that, at first glance, seem to be at odds with one another. Some argue that women were prosecuted more vigorously than men due to a traditional patriarchal understanding of marriage that deemed a woman’s sexual loyalty to be paramount; others maintain that Geneva was a special case, distinct from most of early modern Europe, because men were prosecuted as intensively and as violently for adultery as women.  Some scholars go so far as to argue that Geneva was a “paradis des femmes” because husbands were also held accountable for their sexual wanderings. This chapter demonstrates, however, that Geneva was far more typical in its prosecution of sex crimes than most Reformation historians admit.  For a brief period, the male lovers of adulterous wives were prosecuted aggressively in Geneva.  But if we enlarge our temporal focus to encompass a larger period, and consider the gender and marital status of those punished, it becomes clear that, even in Geneva and even during the Reformation, errant wives were the primary target of adultery prosecutions.

While the ‘bigamy’ rules applied only to the clergy, and remarriage by lay men or women after a spouse’s death was unproblematic, the indissolubility rule applied to all. The earliest papal legislation was already trying to enforce the system (perhaps unique in the history of literate societies) that ruled out both divorce and polygamy. For the married clergy one can imagine that this was successful in that they were under the bishop’s control. What effect it had on the laity is impossible to estimate but the legacy of these decretals would be a key fact in medieval history. Exclusion from communion after proven adultery came within the purview of the clergy.

Chapter Four revisits the controversial issue of sexual assault of female sent-down youth. Archival records make it clear that the compilation of statistics and the investigation of sexual misconduct were part of a campaign triggered by a state directive in 1973 concerning “harm to sent-down youth,” a campaign that pressured local officials to identify, expose, and investigate locals who had romantic relations with female sent-down youth, and punish individuals found guilty of sexual assault. This was not limited to rape, but included a range of behaviors and relationships previously deemed inappropriate and now classified as criminal: seduction, adultery, and molestation as well as flirting, dating, and affairs. Regardless of what type of intimacy was the basis of accusation and investigation, in almost every case individuals found to be guilty perpetrators of abuse were local men, and those they abused were urban women. Male sent-down youth who engaged in similar intimacies with fellow sent-down youth or local women were exempted from the investigations, as were local men who engaged in such intimacies with rural women.