Status, gender and emotions: family conflicts at the Parlement de Toulouse

ABSTRACT As a royal court of justice with jurisdiction over the entire province of Languedoc, southern France, the Parlement de Toulouse left an impressive but largely overlooked legacy of well preserved judicial records. Based on the case study of a 1444 trial pitting a widow, Isabelle de Ferréol, against her stepson, Raymond-Bernard de Montpezat, this article deconstructs the narrative structure of the pleas. Centred on the process of character creation and on the mechanics of defamation, the article analyses how the procurators who represented the plaintiff and the defendant in court shaped the contrasting characters of their clients. Instrumental in framing the true-sounding stories told by the procurators to the court were the politics of the Hundred Years’ War, gender constructs, late medieval family culture, law and literary tropes.