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Sara McDougall is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and appointed to the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies gender and justice in the Middle Ages, with a focus on women’s encounters with legal and religious ideas in the society and culture of Medieval France. She is the author of two books, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, c.800-1230 (Oxford, 2017). She has co-edited special issues for Law & History Review and Gender & History on historical responses infanticide and on marriage in global history, on marriage trials for Medieval People, and a six-volume Global History of Crime and Punishment with Bloomsbury Press. Recent articles examine punishing women for having sex, infanticide prosecutions, consequences of extramarital pregnancy, illegitimacy and the priesthood, and adultery prosecution in medieval France, as well as other writings on the family, marriage, gender, and crime. She has also written on these topics for Slate, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

In 2023-2024 she was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library. In 2022 she was a visiting professor at Paris II Panthéon-Assas and an Astor Visiting Professor at Oxford University. She was also the Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in the winter of 2020. Other fellowships include the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and NYU Law School’s Golieb Legal History fellowship. She completed her doctorate in medieval history at Yale University in May 2009.

Her third book is a biographical microhistory of a woman called Jehanne, a thirtysomething woman from the Lorraine.

Recent Publications

Royal Bastards: the birth of illegitimacy, 800-1230 (Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in Medieval European History, January 2017).

Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, March 2012). 

Editorial Projects:
with Arnaud Fossier, “Marriage on Trial: Gendered Justice, Family Strategies,” Special Issue of the journal Medieval People 39:1 (December 2024).

with the late Clive Emsley, A Global History of Crime and Punishment, 6 volumes. Bloomsbury
Press (August 2023).

with Felicity Turner, Forum: “Rethinking the Criminalization of Childbirth: Infanticide in Premodern Europe and the Modern Americas,” Law & History Review 39:2 (May 2021).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
with Arnaud Fossier, “Introduction,” in “Marriage on Trial: Gendered Justice, Family Strategies,” Special Issue of the journal Medieval People 39:1 (Fall 2024).

with Emily Hutchison, “Women’s Labor in Later Medieval France: Case Studies from Paris,” in Medieval Work, Worship and Power: Persuasive and Silenced Voices Essays in Honor of
Sharon Farmer, eds. Abby Dowling, Nancy McLoughlin, and Tanya Stabler Miller (Routledge, 2025).

“Sex with Nuns in Medieval France,” in The Learned and Lived Law: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, eds. Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Saskia Lettmaire, and Nikitas Hatzimihail (Brill Press, November 2024).

with Emily Hutchison, “Pardonable Sodomy: Uncovering Laurence’s Sin and Recovering the Range of the Possible,” Medieval People 2 (January 2023).

“Judging Sexy Women in Late Medieval France,” postmedieval, August 2022. with Merle Eisenberg and Laura Morreale, “Middle Ages for Educators,” New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 3:2 (2022).

“Canon Law and Marriage,” in the Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law, eds. Anders Winroth and John Wei (CUP, January 2022).
“Singlewomen and Illicit Pregnancy in Late Medieval France: The Case of Marie Ribou (1481)”
French Historical Studies, 44:3 (August 2021).
“Pardoning Infanticide in Late Medieval France,” Law & History Review 39:2 (May 2021).
“The Chivalric Family” in Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages, eds. David Crouch and Jeroen Deploige, (Leuven University Press, 2020).

“Bastard Priests: Illegitimacy and Ordination in Medieval Europe,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 94/1 (January 2019).

Media Coverage

Slate, New York Times, Washington Post, Perspectives, Law & History Review "The Docket," Ms. Magazine online.

Social Media

@sarannmcd.bsky.social

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

France, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Medieval

Expertise by Topic

Children & Youth, Family, Gender, Law, Religion, Sexuality, Sexual Violence, Women