Lives at Stake: Attitudes and Responses to the Burning of Women in Medieval England, c .1200– c .1450

This article attempts to explain when, and why, it came to be thought appropriate to hang men but to burn women. Concentrating on wives who slew their husbands, it aims to answer these questions, focussing less on the crime than on the punishment, investigating its origins and outlining the form it took. But it also aspires to go beyond these fundamental issues, by employing burning as a kind of prism through which light can be shed on some of the forces and outlooks at work in medieval English society, both those which might lead to women being confronted with this dire fate, and those which might enable them to escape it.