Me Too in the Middle Ages

Jehanne de Relanges was making a criminal allegation of rape. This is how she first told her story to the municipal investigator, Jaques Borestal, who took on the case. She was sitting by the fire in her landlady’s home in Dijon around six in the evening on the Sunday following the Feast of the Innocents in January 1473. She was nearing the end of her pregnancy. Two men burst into the house; Jehanne didn’t recognize them. They told her she had to come with them. She refused. The men threatened to take Jehanne by force, and said if she came willingly she would only be raped by the two of them. Still she refused. One of the men left and came back with four more men, mercenaries, with weapons. Jehanne remembered a man with a big beard and a javelin, a man in a colored tunic with a bow and arrow, and a boy with a dagger. The one with the big beard told Jehanne that she was only pretending to be pregnant.Jehanne pled with the men, Jaques recorded: “She did not know when she might go into labor and deliver her baby, that she was a good respectable woman.”1 The men replied “that she was coming, pregnant or not pregnant, and that if she lost her baby, it did not matter since she was pregna...