Meurtres entre époux en péninsule ibérique à la fin du Moyen Âge (XVe-XVIe siècles)

Abstract

The murder of the husband or wife was still uncommon among the judicial archives of the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, cases of uxoricide offered the most common examples of this category of crime, throughout the couple. As such, husbands competed for judges to set the social indiscipline generated by illicit love of their wives. They often benefited from charters granted pardon by families or by the King, provided that adultery was based invoked. But the Iberian monarchs included, at the dawn of the sixteenth century, that the right to punish to death in the family no longer had to belong to all men (husband or father) but only King. The murders between spouses then became a political issue as soon as the Catholic Kings, first in Castile, decided to extract them from the private sphere to seize it with a twofold objective: reduce revenge; promote the involvement of public justice to regulate the effects of female adultery. Finally, the objective here is to bring the forms of judicial story of the murders confined to domestic cell, and understand why they came to the knowledge of the Aragonese lay judges, even more in the case of these attempts of homicide and yet failed trial, although no corpse. Moreover, what allowed women to convince a judge to cite their husbands to appear, denouncing them for attempted homicide?.