458: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor w/ Sara McDougall

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Erik Rivenes (2:26)

Hello, friends. This is Erik and welcome to another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast. Well, I am so pleased to introduce my guest today, Sara McDougall. She is a professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York, and is on the faculty in biography and memoir, French history and medieval studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She's the author of Royal Bastards, The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800 to 1230, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne, and she's got a brand new book, which just came out in September, called Justice for Jehanne, The Tale of a Medieval Survivor.

Welcome to Most Notorious. I so appreciate you coming on.

Sara McDougall (3:23)

Thank you so much, Erik. I'm so excited to be here. So many of my students are true crime fans, and so this might actually mean they think I'm cool.

Erik Rivenes (3:37)

Well, they of course are welcome to listen. That's really great.

So right off the bat, how did you first hear about this case? It's not a story that's really well known, is it?

Sara McDougall (3:50)

No, it's essentially completely unknown. So the story I would of course love to tell is that I was in the archives, in Dijon, in France, looking and looking and looking, and I found something that no one had ever seen before that had been miscatalogued or something like that. But it's unfortunately a more modern story. It was in spring of 2020 I was a very lucky recipient of a visiting professorship at the University of Michigan at their Humanities Center, and I was working on a project for them, and I was looking for every single example I could find of pregnant women in all kinds of circumstances.

I stumbled across this footnote. You know, the most boring stuff in theory, at least. But it was this footnote from this book that was written in the early 80s, and it mentioned that there was this pregnant woman who had been sexually assaulted and that she had been so ashamed that she had refused to even admit what had happened to her. And that just got me really curious and frustrated, not least because it didn't even name her. And so I just felt like I had to know more. I had to try to see if I could find this unknown woman.

And so I had the, you know, the year that it was supposed to have happened, although not entirely perfectly represented. But because I had already been doing a lot of work in Dijon, in particular in collaboration with a very close friend and colleague there, I was able to email him and say, can you look for this for me? Here's when it's supposed to have happened. Here's supposed to have done it. I don't know who this woman was because he doesn't name her, but can you find it? This guy knows everything about this archive.