Call for papers EAUH 2026 – Consent and Sexual Violence in Late Medieval European Cities
Synthesis
This session explores sexual violence and consent in late medieval Europe through an interdisciplinary lens. Connecting legal, social and literary history, it invites comparative studies across regions and source types to reassess how urban communities understood, regulated, and represented sexuality.
Presentation
This session will bring together scholars working across legal, social, and literary history, to examine how medieval urban communities understood, regulated, and responded to sexual behavior, particularly regarding sexual violence and consent. Existing scholarship often approached this topic through either literary or legal frameworks, with a primary focus on England, Italy and France. This panel seeks to broaden both the methodological and geographical scope by encouraging comparative case studies tied to cities across Europe and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between social historians of law and justice and scholars of medieval literature and culture.
Medieval conceptions of sex and gender were deeply informed by Christian theology, often casting female sexuality as disruptive or morally ambiguous, associating women with lust, temptation and disorder. However, the extent to which such ideological constructs shaped societal responses to sexual behavior remains up for debate. While many scholars have argued that urban legal institutions functioned to enforce patriarchal norms and discipline female sexuality, recent studies suggest a more complex picture, that requires the study of a wider variety of sources, combining legal and literary frameworks in particular. Judicial practices were not monolithic; they varied significantly depending on local customs, social hierarchies, institutional structures and individual cases. As literature was ubiquitous in urban public life, songs and stories bring another perspective to this mosaic, voicing people’s thoughts, worries and wishes. Most importantly, both literary and legal sources indicate that people’s responses to force and abuse were more positive, equal and resilient than idealized and theoretical texts suggest. This panel therefore seeks to bring about an interdisciplinary conversation to do justice for the complex and sensitive topic of sexual violence.
To further examine this resilient side of medieval sexual culture, this session encourages papers about multilingual regions and cities as places of intercultural exchange. Recent studies have emphasized that many medieval European cities were essentially multilingual areas, fostering a free exchange of thought across languages by their interconnectedness. These circumstances may have been crucial to the emergence of new ideas regarding sexuality, gender and power.
This session proposes a space for comparison: How were sexual violence and consent reflected in different types of sources, targeting different audiences and objectives? How did legal systems interpret consent and adjudicate cases? How did literary texts reflect or challenge norms, especially across linguistic boundaries? Papers connecting legal records and literary sources or exploring lesser-studied jurisdictions are especially welcome, to chart a more critical understanding of how medieval societies confronted sexual violence and negotiated consent.
Organizers
- Cécile de Morrée
Radboud University - Chanelle Delameillieure
KU Leuven
Conference Information
“City Networks in Europe and Beyond” – Seventeenth European Association for Urban History Conference (EAUH) – Barcelona, September 2-5, 2026.
Paper proposals (max. 2.500 characters) must be submitted through the conference website before October 22, 2025.