Most of the women who ever lived left no trace of their existence
on the record of history. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women
of the middling and lower levels of society left no letters or
diaries in which they expressed what they felt or thought. Criminal
courts and magistrates kept few records of their testimonies, and
no ecclesiastical court records are known to survive for the French
Roman Catholic Church between 1540 and 1667. For the most part, we
cannot hear the voices of ordinary French women - but this study
allows us to do so. Based on the evidence of 1,200 cases brought
before the consistories - or moral courts - of the Huguenot church
of Languedoc between 1561 and 1615, The Voices of Nimes allows us
to access ordinary women's everyday lives: their speech, behaviour,
and attitudes relating to love, faith, and marriage, as well as
friendship and sex. Women appeared frequently before the consistory
because one of the chief functions of moral discipline was the
regulation of sexuality, and women were thought to be primarily
responsible for sexual sin. This means that the registers include
over a thousand testimonies by and about women, most of whom left
no other record to posterity. Women also featured so prominently
before the consistories because of an ironic, unintended
consequence of the consistorial system: it empowered women. Women
quickly learnt how to use the consistory: they denounced those who
abused them, they deployed the consistory to force men to honour
their promises, and they started rumours they knew would be
followed up by the elders. The registers therefore offer unrivalled
evidence of women's agency, in this intensely patriarchal society,
in a range of different contexts, such as their enjoyment of their
sexuality, choice of marriage partners, or idiosyncratic spiritual
engagement. The consistorial registers, therefore, let us see how
independent, self-determining, and vocal women could be in an age
when they had limited legal rights, little official power, and few
prospects. As a result, this book suggests we need to
reconceptualize female power: women's power was not just hidden,
manipulative, and devious, but also far more public than historians
have previously recognized.
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