ABSTRACT
As an author's doctoral supervisor, Henrietta Leyser impressed upon him how the high middle ages, widely recognized for its emerging institutions, was also very much a peopled age and a society being actively, often consciously, forged by its people. Its structures did not simply emerge; they were created, as much by the beliefs or ambition of the creators as by a more pragmatic concern to sort things out. She met his interest in the constitutional forms of religious houses with her own sense of the distinctiveness of any circumstance and, especially of the people in the midst of change who were confronted with competing challenges. Leyser's work demonstrates how aristocratic mothers tended their young children, a study of dynastic hospitals extends this picture of active motherhood beyond their children's youth. It suggests that aristocratic women could take a distinctive role in formulating the future of their family, tending their children financially, politically and spiritually into adulthood and even after death.
