Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries.There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of coverture applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal material from medieval and early modern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden,Norway and Germany enable a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of coverture was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book are married women'srights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts. Cordelia Beattie is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh; Matthew Frank Stevens is Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University Contributors: Lars Ivar Hansen, Shennan Hutton, Lizabeth Johnson, Gillian Kenny, Mia Korpiola, Miriam Muller, S.C. Ogilvie, Alexandra Shepard, Cathryn Spence.

Introduction: Uncovering Married Women - Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank StevensWhen Two Worlds Collide: Marriage and the Law in Medieval Ireland - Gillian KennyInheritance, Property and Marriage in Medieval Norway - Lars Ivar HansenSpousal Disputes, the Marital Property System, and the Law in Later Medieval Sweden - Mia KorpiolaMarried Women, Crime and the Courts in Late Medieval Wales - Lizabeth JohnsonPeasant Women, Agency and Status in Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-century England: Some Reconsiderations - Miriam MullerLondon's Married Women, Debt Litigation and Coverture in the Court of Common Pleas - Matthew Frank StevensMarried Women, Contracts and Coverture in Late Medieval England - Cordelia BeattieProperty, Family and Partnership: Married Women and Legal Capability in Late Medieval Ghent - Shennan Hutton'For His Interest'?: Women, Debt and Coverture in Early Modern Scotland - Cathryn SpenceThe Worth of Married Women Witnesses in the English Church Courts, 1550-1730 - Alexandra ShepardMarried Women, Work and the Law: Evidence from Early Modern Germany - Sheilagh Ogilvie