ABSTRACT
Over the last quarter-century, one of the key advances in our understanding of European society during the middle ages an advance in which the work of Henrietta Leyser has been seminal has been a much sharper appreciation of the political role of women, and its potentially central importance. A previous generation of historians not unreasonably saw their position as marginal. Medieval Europe was by any standards a highly gendered society where all frontline roles appeared to be played by men. Power in any society comes in a variety of forms, and ranges from the highly circumscribed, limited to the workings of very small worlds, to the acknowledged leadership of peoples and states. Not all female power in the middle ages depended upon motherhood. An empress or queen was de facto an aristocrat with patronage to dispense and access to resources that made them dangerous for lesser mortals of either sex to cross.
