Sara McDougall is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and appointed to the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies gender and justice in the Middle Ages, with a focus on women’s encounters with legal and religious ideas in the society and culture of Medieval France. She is the author of two books, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, c.800-1230 (Oxford, 2017). She has co-edited special issues for Law & History Review and Gender & History on historical responses infanticide and on marriage in global history, and a six-volume Global History of Crime and Punishment is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press in 2023. Recent articles examine punishing women for having sex, infanticide prosecutions, consequences of extramarital pregnancy, illegitimacy and the priesthood, and adultery prosecution in medieval France, as well as other writings on the family, marriage, gender, and crime. She has also written on these topics for Slate, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
In 2022 she was a visiting professor at Paris II Panthéon-Assas and an Astor Visiting Professor at Oxford University. She was also the Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in the winter of 2020. In 2023-2024 she was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library. Other fellowships include the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and NYU Law School’s Golieb Legal History fellowship. She completed her doctorate in medieval history at Yale University in May 2009.
Her third book, published by Princeton in 2026, is about a woman named Jehanne, a thirtysomething woman from the Lorraine with a remarkable story. Written as a police procedural, the book follows an investigating magistrate as he collects testimony in 1472 Dijon, concerning the alleged sexual assault, and then the reputation and conduct of Jehanne. Using the magistrate’s writings to reconstruct Jehanne’s life and her stories, the book brings to life the experiences of women in this society, their encounters with justice in general and litigation over sexual violence, as well as their survival strategies, defying many of our preconceived ideas about women in the Middle Ages.
