Women, Gender and Lordship in France, c .1050–1250

Arguing that scholars should follow methods of analysis developed by historians of women in the early Middle Ages and must confront problems in the so‐called ‘Duby thesis’, this article shows how anachronistic analytical categories and insufficient source criticism have masked our appreciation of the extensive political activities of non‐royal aristocratic women in France during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Emphasising the domestic context of lordship and political action in this period, as well as the multivalence of gender as an explanatory category, it reveals strong continuities between women's powers in the early and central Middle Ages and shows that female lords were a routine and acceptable part of the medieval French political scene.