This Palgrave Pivot details, for the first time in English, the royal petitioning system in the Crown of Aragon during the High Middle Ages. It explores the unique role royal petitioning played in resolving intra-communal and intra-familial conflicts in the lives of Jews across the Crown’s territories. This book demonstrates the importance of local legal avenues for redress and conflict resolution that operated alongside halakhah for Jews in the Crown of Aragon. The frequent, sustained engagement of the Crown in everyday lives and relatively small-scale disputes of its subjects had a major impact on Jewish communal life, the role of halakhah in the medieval Crown of Aragon, and Jewish women’s access to redress.

Miri Fenton received her Ph.D. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.