The Duchy of Burgundy in the 14th and 15th centuries was a glittering centre of arts and culture. The dukes commissioned glorious books of hours, had their portraits painted by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden and led the European fashion in sumptuous clothing and jewellery. Johan Huizinga memorably evoked the splendour of the duchy in his classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), but also told us, somewhat fancifully, that back then ‘life bore the smell of blood and roses’. Sara McDougall’s new book focuses on the dark side of the glamour: not only on the pervasive violence in the war-torn duchy, but also on the sustained attempts to control such violence and to bring the perpetrators to justice.

The protagonist of McDougall’s story is known only by her first name, Jehanne. She’s a young pregnant woman who came to the prosperous city of Dijon all the way from Lorraine. The account of her sexual assault is no less shocking for having been recorded 550 years ago. On 3 January 1473, the Sunday night of the ‘feast of fools’ weekend, a group of armed mercenaries from Picardy, quartered at a local inn, burst into the house where Jehanne was staying with her older landlady. They dragged the young woman outside, beat her with a stick, threw her into a snowy ditch and tried to rape her. She fought back and prevented penetration, but sustained injuries that her midwife witnessed when she went into labour two days later, delivering a baby girl early on the Tuesday morning.

McDougall tells the story of Jehanne’s attempted rape, but also uses the legal records to piece together insights into how a single female immigrant could make a life for herself in a 15th-century city. McDougall reminds us that – contrary to what we might expect of the ‘dark’ Middle Ages