Gender Troubles and Plantagenet Petitionary Culture

Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation

Description

This paper will examine the evidence of lived experiences of men and women as they navigated the complexities of the law and local custom in the Plantagenet World and how we might approach the place of gender and justice in Plantagenet Politics.

Private petitioning provided a mechanism by which subjects of the Plantagenet kings could bring their complaints before parliament to be heard directly by the king, council, House of Lords or commons thereby bypassing local judicial systems which were often corrupt and under the control of powerful local magnates, their families and their retainers.

Through an examination of private petitioning as a weapon of political disputation the paper will bridge the gap between scholarship which has focused on the parliamentary frameworks of petitioning and scholarship which has considered the importance of those outside of the political elite in the Plantagenet World. In particular it will draw attention to a selection of thirteenth and fourteenth century petitions which demonstrate the priorities which drove political engagement which we can see in the private petitions; particularly issues of disinheritance and lineage.

Lancaster Historical Postgradutate Conference, University of Lancaster
Period25 Jun 2025 → 27 Jun 2025
Held atLancaster University, United Kingdom
Degree of RecognitionInternational

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