This was the second of our series of Kalamazoo sessions on various aspects of the study of Medieval Law as a cultural phenomenon within different societies of the medieval West. We insist only that papers aim to address a standard Kalamazoo audience in clear, humane language requiring no particular legal expertise. Like Law itself, legal history has far too much general interest to be abandoned to its specialists.

  Gender and Sexuality are, of course, subjects of intense interest to most us, now and always. Most attempts to study the area utilize legal materials and often involve questions about the innate biases of legal doctrine and legal systems. Sometimes such studies deploy their law with technical expertise and accuracy; quite often they do not. We invite papers about aspects of medieval sexuality vis à vis law -- secular law as well as canon and roman law.

 Another obvious topic is Marriage. Regarded as the main method by which western civilization has sought to tame and control the violence that sexual competition can bring, to bridle desire as the scholastics said, marriage is close to central in medieval culture. Introductory survey courses could easily be organized around Marriage instead of Government. Its impact is felt in almost every manifestation of Power, Economics (Land Ownership and Inheritance), Sociology (Family etc.) and, of course, artistic creativity. Even our own courts and legislatures still grapple with the consequences of changes in the law of marriage, especially those that occurred during the twelfth century.

 No culture we know has succeeded in confining sexual activity to marriage. What then of "adultery" and other extra-marital sex? What can we conclude about the frequency and normality of fornication from the records of its prosecution in church courts: How far did the courts try to exclude extra-marital sex and its commodification by prostitution?

 How and why did law come to discriminate so widely and brutally against "bastards"? How much effect did their disabilities have? We know of no good studies of illegitimacy as a social cohort in our period; here is a gap worth filling.

 There is no need to labor the concern so widely shown in our day about Rape. How routine was it in the western past? Does this prove the persistence of Patriarchy? We debate these and other questions of similar importance to our present-day selves. Yet the tangled history of "Raptus" in secular law is only now being disentangled from its Civilian and Canonist roots. Much remains to be discovered and re-assessed.

 Recent studies have emphasized the cultural origins of our very concept of Sexuality. Some now doubt the very existence of the "Two-Gender Model" before the early modern period. Law is an important forum in which the real-life consequences of such abstruse matters are defined and redefined. What did it make of Hermaphrodites? Was there really a directed repression of homosexual behavior in the later middle ages, as has been claimed?