Women engaged in litigation in Nottingham's borough court as both plaintiffs and defendants for a variety of reasons relating to trade, household provisioning, misbehavior and interpersonal disputes. This article examines how women's litigation was determined by the doctrine of coverture and the way that women's marital status shaped and defined their experience of the law. In doing so, it explores how these pleas reveal the workings of the marital partnership within a late medieval English town. In order to contextualize the experiences of women “under coverture,” the article first traces the ways in which all manner of female marital and household identities were documented in the court records, analyzing the descriptors that court scribes attached to individual women's names. The article highlights inconsistency in the way that women's identities were recorded and in the way that the marital partnership was represented through the litigation of spouses in the borough court. The dual focus of this article not only adds new evidence to ongoing discussions of the nature of medieval coverture but also interrogates how we identify coverture and women's marital statuses based on the evidence of court records.

中文翻译：

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中世纪晚期诺丁汉的隐瞒和婚姻伙伴关系：自治市镇法院的妇女诉讼，ca。1300–ca.1500

由于贸易、家庭供应、不当行为和人际纠纷等各种原因，女性在诺丁汉自治市镇法院作为原告和被告参与诉讼。本文探讨了女性诉讼是如何由隐蔽原则决定的，以及女性的婚姻状况如何塑造和定义她们的法律经验。在这样做的过程中，它探讨了这些请求如何揭示在中世纪晚期的英国小镇中婚姻伙伴关系的运作方式。为了将女性“隐蔽”的经历置于语境中，本文首先追溯了法庭记录中记录各种女性婚姻和家庭身份的方式，分析了法庭抄写员对个别女性姓名的描述。这篇文章强调了记录妇女身份的方式以及通过在自治市镇法院对配偶提起诉讼来代表婚姻伙伴关系的方式的不一致之处。本文的双重焦点不仅为正在进行的关于中世纪隐蔽性质的讨论增加了新的证据，而且还质疑了我们如何根据法庭记录的证据来识别隐蔽和女性的婚姻状况。