“…with these books women will be able to know laws”: Women, Law, and Legal Literacies in the Iberian Worlds (18th-19th centuries)

In the preface of a 1736 Spanish translation of Justinian’s Institutes, the author engaged with his opponents’ accusations that he was “making law intelligible for women.”

The overarching thread of this research proposal is the relationship between women and legal knowledge (saberes jurídicos). The sources selected, ranging from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, address two types of questions: first, whether women could be considered “readers” or “users” of legal texts in general (encompassing both authoritative texts and pragmatic legal compendia). Secondly, the role of a distinct legal-literary genre, that of “legal literature for women,” will be examined. The acquisition of “legal skills” or “notions of law” by women was largely perceived as an anomaly or a threat to the “disciplinary matrix” of jurisprudence. This perception was challenged in the context of broader debates on the education of women that circulated in the texts of the so-called querelle des femmes. Recent scholarship has focused on “legal literacy,” “legal intelligibility,” or the production and social uses of “popular legal knowledge”: this presentation will address these issues and their intersections with the history of women.