Abstract
My main focus is on the types of the adultery and for proving these, I will use examples from the Chinese and Koryŏ law codes and articles from Koryŏ chronicles. The adultery in the Koryŏ period can be divided into consensual intercourse and rape.
Furthermore, it can also be divided according to the family, status, and bureaucracy system, or according to the system of punishments. In the law codes, women are always recorded as passive objects, but from various articles, we can know that this was not the case conditionally.
Also, punishments for women were not always lighter than those for men. In fact, some very heavy punishments, such as recording women's names in a document called chanyŏan 姿女案 etc., were designated only for women.
Through this research, I tried to ascertain what role women had in the adultery system of the Koryŏ period, and how much passive or active they might have been in the real cases. I compared the findings from the real cases with the official view of the law codes of Koryŏ and China.
Finally, I tried to answer following questions - how were women perceived in this period and what social status they retained?