This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonomous individuals. Gender intersected in British courts with locality, resources, jurisdiction, social status, and familial, religious, and political affiliations to inform different women's access to justice, which involved negotiations between unequal actors within various constraints and in complex alignment with multiple and often competing interests.

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.

The Holodomor in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 was a result of the collectivization policy of the Soviet government and took approximately 4 million lives. The Holodomor had a profound impact on the entire population of Ukraine. It badly affected the lives of Jews in Kyiv and Ukraine, and it damaged Jewish–gentile relations for many years. The famine occurred not only in rural areas, but also in the cities and towns of Ukraine. The Holodomor provoked a significant migration of Jews from shtetls to the large cities, particularly to Kyiv. Many desperate inhabitants of villages and towns fled to the large cities where they hoped to receive some aid. However, the overcrowded cities could not accommodate this flood of migrants. Anatolii Kuznetsov wrote in Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel that if not for the Holodomor in Ukraine and Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s, the attitude of the Kyiv gentile population toward the Holocaust would perhaps have been different. People had gotten so used to the suffering of others, victims of the famine and political repression, that they remained mainly passive, silent, and indifferent toward the mass execution of Jews in Babi Yar during the Holocaust.