In "Remarkable Women" Carole Owens is able to extrapolate from the formal and often obscure language of court documents and legal filings, the rough and tumble times of illicit sex, greed, land grabbing lawyers, and powerful oligarchies.
Premarital sex was sanctioned and encouraged when two people were engaged to be married so the couple could determine beforehand if the marriage would be fruitful. What the women in the fornication trials were actually being punished for was not the act but failing to marry the man afterward.
