Abstract
This article unpacks the contexts and meanings of one extended episode surrounding a notary's wife, her husband, their kin, his clients, and the judicial system. It suggests how women as agents and subjects were central in the interlocking web of social relations and laws that maintained a complex, negotiated, and contested, household-based gender hierarchy as a key element of the social and political topography of early modern Trance. The legal disadvantages and exclusions women faced were key elements in the maintenance of an inequitable gender hierarchy. Yet "the law" was a complicated matter involving national decrees promulgated by the monarchy and regional customary laws. Moreover, these laws gained meaning only in the encounters between the many different actors—spouses and kin who were part of middling families, as well as notaries, judges, and lawyers whose roles were to put laws into practice—that constituted the legal process.
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