ABSTRACT
This article investigates the ways in which disciplinary and penal power were embedded within male-female relations and jurisdiction in early modern society and law, especially in the micro-legal cultures of the Swedish and Bavarian capitals. On a more concrete level, the analysis wishes to profit from exemplary court cases concerning marital disagreements, adultery and sexual violence, and handled by the secular lower courts of the cities Stockholm and Munich in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In both cities a higher royal or ducal court could be used as the second legal instance, and
