Content Note: This Friday Reflection discusses rape, sexual assault, and physical violence.
Why This Conversation Matters
It is easy to judge a system of justice by asking whether it recognized a wrong. But is harder to ask whether it possessed the authority, institutions, and practical means to do anything about that wrong once it had been recognized. In the early 21st century United States, we often assume both things; but we should not.
This distinction lies at the center of Sara McDougall’s reconstruction of the case of a woman named Jehanne’s. The officials of fifteenth-century Dijon did not simply dismiss the allegations of this pregnant immigrant from Champagne to their city. An investigator met her, recorded her testimony, questioned her neighbors, and pursued the men she accused. Jehanne herself appeared before those men and identified them. The machinery of justice ground forward. Yet whether it could deliver justice was another question entirely.
This is what makes Jehanne’s story more than an account of crime in the Middle Ages. It is a conversation about what happens in the uncertain space between testimony and judgment. It reminds us that the rule of law is not merely a collection of good principles. It is an achievement of institutions, authority, habits, and capacities whose absence is felt most sharply by those with the fewest alternatives.
Throughlines
The conversation begins with the difficulty of Jehanne’s story. It involves sexual assault, extreme violence, and cruelty that can seem safely confined to “the Middle Ages.” Yet neither Sara McDougall nor I wanted to place it at a comfortable historical distance. There are people suffering comparable violence in our own communities whose lives remain invisible to many of us. While some of this story is distinctly medieval, some of it is about humanity.
From there we turn to Jaques Borestal, the substitute prosecutor whose papers preserve Jehanne’s testimony. Borestal combined some of the work of an investigator and a prosecutor, spending decades examining allegations of theft, assault, abduction, murder, and rape. We encounter Jehanne because he wrote down her words. McDougall therefore structures her book as a police procedural, following his investigation while reminding us that the archive was created by officials rather than by the people we most wish to hear.
Borestel, it is true, worked within a legal order. Dijon had laws, courts, officials, and a jail. But their authority was sharply limited. Arrest could depend upon whether officials believed they could safely seize the accused. Suspects escaped from jail or were released when it became overcrowded. Punishment usually meant fines, whipping, humiliation, or banishment, while mercy and pardon could be extended even after appalling crimes. The system sought to restore social order, and offer the possibility of repentance and rehabilitation, but its efforts often seem frighteningly inadequate and haphazard.
Borestel began with little more than a report that a pregnant woman had been abducted and assaulted. He searched until he found Jehanne in a widow’s home. Everything that followed depended upon what he observed, what Jehanne told him, and what her neighbors remembered. McDougall preserves the uncertainties in these accounts. Details about Jehanne’s origins, marriage, appearance, and circumstances emerge gradually, and they do not always fit neatly together.
Eventually the conversation reaches the decision at the center of the book. Others questioned about sexual assaults might be willing to testify at first, but then unwilling to make formal complaints. Jehanne chose differently. After giving birth she summoned Borestel again to correct and supplement her testimony. Then, most incredibly of all, she faced the accused men in prison and identified them. She demanded punishment, but not their execution; she did not want their deaths on her conscience. She insisted upon justice while limiting the vengeance sought in her name.
Finally, McDougall challenges the familiar claim that medieval victims of rape were invariably blamed or disbelieved. The records reveal something more complicated. Officials and neighbors could believe that an assault had occurred. The harder question was what an unreliable judicial system could do afterward. Similar weaknesses plagued prosecutions for murder, theft, and other forms of violence. What can appear to be a failure peculiar to sexual crimes was also part of a broader failure of institutional capacity.
Jehanne’s story therefore gives us neither a simple tale of medieval barbarity nor a comforting account of justice achieved. It gives us a survivor who spoke, an investigator who listened, neighbors who helped, and institutions whose power remained uncertain. Between belief and justice lay a distance that neither Jehanne’s courage nor Borestel’s persistence could entirely overcome.
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
What is the difference between a society recognizing an injustice and possessing the institutional capacity to remedy it?
How does Jehanne’s status as an immigrant, a pregnant woman, and a person without powerful local family connections simultaneously increase her vulnerability and affect her willingness to testify?
What are the advantages and dangers of encountering Jehanne primarily through records created by Jaques Borestel?
How should historians write about people whose testimony survives only through the words and categories of officials?
What does Borestel’s long career suggest about the possibilities and limitations of public authority in medieval Dijon?
Why might victims or witnesses decline to pursue a complaint even when authorities appear willing to listen?
How should we understand Jehanne’s demand for punishment alongside her refusal to seek the death penalty?
What does the accused man’s offer to become godfather to Jehanne’s child suggest about violence, remorse, restitution, and the human capacity for moral contradiction? Or does it simply suggest something about the human capacity for cruelty?
When should a historian offer a plausible interpretation, and when is it more responsible to leave a mystery unresolved?
How does placing rape alongside murder, theft, assault, and abduction change our understanding of the failures of medieval justice?
Why are historical myths about the treatment of sexual violence so persistent, even when the surviving evidence complicates them?
What does Jehanne’s case reveal about the relationship between individual courage and institutional power?
For Further Investigation
Sara McDougall, Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton University Press, 2026)
—, Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 (Oxford University Press, 2016)
—, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Ruth Mazo Karras and Katherine E. Pierpont, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 4th ed. (Routledge, 2023)
Trevor Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 1200–1550 (Longman, 2001)
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A Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on using court records to recover lives shaped by violence and unequal power