This collection is a result of a meeting of the minds over breakfast. Like so many fertile conversations in our discipline, it took place in the interstices between conference panels and networking, at a round dining table during the International Medieval Conference at Kalamazoo. It was born of equal parts frustration and incredulity; the women around that table found themselves engaged in the same educatory work that their forbearers had done thirty years ago. Why, after three decades of historical advocacy, of producing and teaching excellent books and articles bringing to light of dozens of women whose political behavior fails to fit modern assumptions of medieval women ’s experience, were we still hearing papers describing powerful women in positions of authority as exceptions to the norm. And not only a “norm” but a norm that presumes that a medieval elite woman was a cipher on the arm of her husband, whose only influence came through whispers in male ears and who, should widowhood allowed her a small measure of influence, was merely a placeholder for her male children. The conversation turned to a rhetorical question: How many “exceptional” women in positions of authority does it take before powerful elite women become the rule?
The ensuing discussion engaged the slipperiness of definitions of medieval power for both women and men. It began to grapple with how previous trajectories of women’s status and activity might be reexamined and reinterpreted. In the face of a growing mountain of evidence of elite women ’s agency , self-determination, and control over the last three decades of research and discovery, how might we now characterize these models? Such questions provided the impetus for eight presentation panels across the space of two years: at the International Medieval Congress , Kalamazoo (2014), The Haskins Society Conference (2014), The Medieval Academy Conference (2015), and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2015). The inquiry culminated in its own event; the “Beyond Exceptionalism ” conference hosted by Dr. Heather Tanner at The Ohio State University, Mansfield campus in September 2015. The participants of the conference, by now a much larger group of scholars engaged in examining medieval elite power , argued for a new paradigm for discussing the power , authority , and agency of medieval elite women . Every essay in this volume starts from the premise that elite women in positions of authority in the central medieval period were expected, accepted, and routine. The routine nature of a woman exercising power does not mean that every woman was successful, or that a particular woman might not face challenges to her authority. It does not mean that misogyny did not influence medieval culture, both lay and ecclesiastical, at every turn, and at every level on the social spectrum much as it does today. It does recognize that the texture of medieval women ’s control and influence was incredibly varied and situated in virtually every locus of medieval life.1 Women used myriad strategies to gain their objectives. These included the “hard” power of martial authority, directing and commanding militias and soldiers, and the “soft” power of diplomacy and social pressure. Their agency was demonstrated in their bureaucratic activity through the rhetoric of charters , the production of cartularies, and through patronage of religious houses, hospitals, artists, and poets. Their administrative activity was multi-faceted, polyvalent, and, most importantly, often unremarkable to their contemporaries. It must, however, be pointed out that the fact that women regularly, habitually, and ordinarily had responsibility for governing kingdoms, counties, and abbeys did not create some sort of “golden age” for women in the central medieval period. Medieval commentators were willing to believe that God could place individual women in positions of power and that individual women could overcome the natural limitations of their sex and at the same time assign qualities such as “capriciousness, physical weakness, lust, instability, lack of intelligence, and a tendency toward duplicity to the female sex as a whole.”2 These deeply embedded gender stereotypes could be and were invoked at any time against a woman, or even in a positive context to encourage a woman in carrying out her duties, as in the oft-cited case of Bernard of Clairvaux urging Melisende of Jerusalem (d. 1161) to “act as a man” as sovereign in Jerusalem .
While medieval misogyny may have shaped how elite women were included, or not, in chronicles , charters , and other documents of practice, modern assumptions have shaped how female presence is interpreted. Male authors wrote about women in chronicles less frequently than they deserved, and the political and ecclesiastical concerns of the authors shaped their presentation.3 If the women supported the author’s concerns, their actions were presented favorably; if the authors opposed the women or their families, the very same actions were excoriated. Modern historians have sometimes failed to problematize and contextualize chronicle sources. Similarly, charters, writs , letters, and other administrative instruments document women ’s roles approximately thirty percent of the time.4 Women ’s acta, in all likelihood, survive in fewer numbers than those of men because of patriarchal preferences. The inclusion of noble and royal women with other family members in charters has often been interpreted to mean that the women were included as “window dressing,” and fails to recognized that their presence was often necessary to give the act validity. The presence of women was also taken as a signal that the act in question was a predominately private one, consigning women —even those who acted publically—to the private sphere in a feat of circular logic.
Women’ s letters even to popes, bishops, and kings survive sporadically, but letters between women have rarely been retained. The responses of men, which were often entered into chancery records or episcopal records, indicate that women ’s letters were received, read, and taken seriously, but women’s letters survive in far fewer numbers than do the responses of their male correspondents. It is well known that episcopal figures such as Anselm of Bec , archbishop of Canterbury, or Ivo, bishop of Chartres, corresponded with a wide circle of women including Countesses Ida of Boulogne and Adela of Blois , Duchess Matilda of Tuscany, and two queens of England, Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Boulogne. It is unlikely that these women , many of whom were related by blood or marriage , would not also have corresponded with each other. We would have a much fuller understanding of the dynamics of power and compromise during the English investiture controversy, for instance, if these letters had been preserved.5
Family, as a key institution of the medieval period, and the modern conception of it as a private one, is also a key component of the current discussion that characterizes elite women ’s power and agency as exceptional in the central and late medieval periods. Ironically, the idea that once powerful women were excluded from the exercise of authority because of the rise of administrative kingship and impersonal institutions of government stems from the groundbreaking work on women in the early medieval period by Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Fonay Wemple . They argued that noblewomen , prior to 1050, had access to wealth and control over land, and therefore power , because of the inheritance and marriage practices of noble families. Political fragmentation in that era prompted noble families to assume formerly royal power s. The McNamara -Wemple thesis is predicated upon a public–private dichotomy ; in other words, the early medieval period is characterized by the private exercise of governmental powers by elite families in the absence of public royal authority. With the revival of royal centralized government, or public power operating through bureaucratic institutions, families relegated female members into the private realm. They did so through restricting their rights to inherit land and legal personhood through the institutions of primogeniture , the rise of church-enforced monogamy , coverture , and the renaissance of Roman legal principles. These changes...