Latin translators chose pejorative verbs to sexualize Islamic legal institutions.

Evidence

Descriptions of the faflil often betray the preoccupations of the authors. The lex super repudio was described by the reprobatio and the explanatio stmboli as requiring that the fourth marriage of the same spouses shall take place after the wife is ‘known’ by another man, u.or cognoscatur ab alio viro. The choice of the verb here is tendentious; Fidenzio, not usually indulgent to Islam, more fairly said the fourth marriage could not take place until she had married another man, donec cum alio viro nubat et contrahat. San Pedro was also more careful, and was, indeed, exact: after she had married and lain with another man, he said, nupserit et coiverit. Ricoldo preferred to use the pejorative cognosco, to stress the sexual side at the expense of the legal. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 771

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of moralizing vocabulary as class/identity signaling, and to translation-as-bias scholarship.
• DEFINE: Shows how verb choice (cognoscatur vs nupserit et coiverit) encodes translator bias about the same legal act.