The laws of the medieval period offer a partial answer regarding the legal rights of women. They offer insight into how women may have lived their lives, which were dictated by law. With closer analysis, they may also offer clues to how women identified themselves legally and in society. Not much was written about women during this time period, most women were not encouraged to write, nor did they keep personal diaries. As a result, it is quite difficult to understand the identities that women associated themselves with. However, court documents, personal accounts, and analyzes by academic authors offer great insight. This article will focus on the Western European region of the 12th and 13th centuries. Three issues will be addressed; how a woman's identity is formed, how it differs from that of men, and how a woman's legal identity reflects and influences other aspects of her identity. Legal gender identity has caused women to identify themselves as inferior, powerless, silent and unequal. In comparison, Gratian's text on ecclesiastical laws will also be analysed, as it offers an opposing argument that women are identified as equal to men in ecclesiastical law. The identity of inferiority for women was constructed before the Middle Ages. Medieval law was influenced by Roman law, the concepts of which constructed ecclesiastical law, secular law, and the ecclesiastical laws that dictated society. Roman law was patriarchal; women could appear in court, but the custom encouraged was to be represented by a man, as they believed that women should uphold the traditional value of modesty. It paved the way for medieval society to create its own form of Roman law. Ecclesiastical law placed women in a secondary place in creation according to its part of the Origin...... middle of document ......and, 11.Bennett and Karras, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, 136.Bennett and Karas, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, 136.Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 93.Bennett and Karras, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, 140.Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 17.Emilie Amt, “Graziano: Canon Law on Marriage,” in Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2009), 79.Amt, Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook, 80-81. Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens, “Married Women, Contracts and Coverture in Late Medieval England,” in Married Women and the Law in Pre Modern Northwest Europe (New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 134-136. JCP Goldberg, introduction to Medieval Women and the Law, by Noel James Menuge (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), ix.