In Imprisoning Medieval Women: The Non-Judicial Confinement and Abduction of Women in England, c. 1170–1509, Gwen Seabourne uses the detention of women outside formal legal processes as a way of shedding light on medieval ideas about gender and the law. Her study shows that men saw women as characterized by “dangerous weakness,” both liable to blame and in need of protection; this made women, particularly aristocratic women, vulnerable to capture and confinement in various ways.

In the first of three parts, entitled “By Royal Power and Command: Maidens (and Other Women) in Towers,” Seabourne examines the situations which, as she notes in her preface (xv), first led her to investigate the non-judicial confinement of women: those imprisoned by English kings, sometimes for long periods of time, without any due process but simply by royal fiat. Particularly interesting is the first chapter, “Confinement of Women in War and Armed Conflict,” where Seabourne breaks new ground in her analysis of the different ways aristocratic women were subjected to detention in the context of war. A very short Chapter 2 (which would have been better folded into one of the other chapters) discusses royal wardship and idiocy guardianship, while Chapter 3 examines the locations and terms of aristocratic women's confinement. Seabourne argues in Part I that the treatment of women confined by the king was marked by uncertainty and ambiguity; unlike aristocratic men, whose status as prisoners of war or hostages was regulated by conventions of honor and chivalry, women were not considered to be subject to those conventions. Their confinement thus tended to be ad hoc, unregulated, and sometimes difficult to challenge. The peculiar situation of medieval aristocratic women—as both entirely subordinate to male guardians and yet, as marital prizes, of great political and economic value—made them especially vulnerable to different kinds of confinement.

In Part II, “Wrongful Imprisonment and Abduction: Legal Responses and their Limits,” Seabourne moves to address other kinds of confinement, particularly abduction. In the four chapters in this section, she considers English legislation on abduction and ravishment and the actions in courts and other venues (such as petitions to the king's council) arising from that legislation. Here she sure-footedly argues that the statutes, promulgated from the thirteenth through the fifteenth century, both bolstered the law-and-order credentials of kings at moments of disorder or weakness and shielded the interests of propertied men, rather than primarily protecting the abducted or ravished women themselves. She ends this section by addressing the scholarly debate concerning women's complicity in abductions, the contention that some, perhaps many, cases presented as abductions were in fact consensual elopements or other escapes in which the female “victim” fully colluded. Her conclusions, that we cannot know to what extent the allegations in legal records conceal elopements or “runaway wives,” is more in agreement than disagreement with the views of many of the scholars with whom she claims to differ.

Part III, “Other Roles,” is the shortest of the three and consists of a single chapter, in which Seabourne considers women who consented to confinement—nuns—and women who themselves were captors, caretakers of prisoners, or intercessors on behalf of captives. This chapter is a miscellany of issues that were not covered in other chapters, united by the dubious theme of “further aspects of women's participation” in non-judicial confinement. The contents of this chapter would have been better distributed into the other sections of the book—or simply dropped (the discussion of nuns, for instance, adds little).

This book has many merits. The research in printed and archival sources is extensive and many of the discussions acute and illuminating. On numerous points the arguments are intelligent and persuasive, with much food for thought regarding the uncertainties, vulnerabilities, and occasional opportunities of women's situations in both legal and extra-legal contexts. At other times, however, the arguments are less subtle, perhaps especially in her historiographical discussions related to gender and women's history, where the field has moved beyond the binary of oppressed or empowered women Seabourne assails. There is also some inconsistency in the reading of legal evidence. She often makes the point (sensibly, in my view) that allegations made in legal proceedings can tell us little about what really happened, but at other points she argues that the details included in allegations “sound genuinely violent, and outrageous” (147, see also 159). Surely the point of an allegation was to sound genuine, but this tells us only that the person making the allegation had a good lawyer, not that the allegations were true. Imprisoning Medieval Women is, nonetheless, an important contribution to our understanding of medieval English women and the law.