ABSTRACT
One might well imagine that few figures met with less sympathy in medieval Europe than the adulterous wife suspected of conspiring with her lover to murder her husband. Each aspect of these allegations cast an accused murderer in the worst possible light. For a wife to commit adultery not only violated the Christian, canon law of marriage, it also raised questions about the paternity of her children and suggested that her husband did not have control over his household.1 Conspiracy to kill meant that a murder took place with premeditation, and premeditation did not go over well in a society whose legal system cast as most pardonable acts of violence done in the heat of the moment, and saw as least forgivable any killing committed with forethought and above all by stealth, particularly poison.2 For an adulterous wife to kill her husband, moreover, constituted an attack by an inferior on her superior, petty treason, a dangerous and intolerable subvention of the social and gender hierarchy of medieval Europe.3
