Scholars have recently begun to consider women’s active involvement in medieval warfare. Most of these studies rely on chronicle evidence, which provides a narrow view of the variety of ways women participated, or focus on the experiences of a single woman. This dissertation examines contemporary perceptions of and documents left behind by noblewomen who acted as military leaders in the French kingdom and the Francophone regions to the north and west of the kingdom from 1000 to 1337.

Francophone writers (chroniclers, encyclopedists, and authors of romances) betrayed very little interest in debating “proper” gender roles, and more often than not portrayed bellicose women in a positive light throughout the three hundred years under examination, despite the changes in medieval society that affected perceptions of women’s ability to rule and nobles’ access to military leadership. The diplomatic documents (financial accounts, letters patent, treaties, etc.) fill in the holes left behind by the chroniclers, who preferred to focus on flashy deeds of derring-do. The concern displayed by noblewomen in regard to fortifying and garrisoning castles and towns, victualling troops, and attracting allies reveals that noblewomen participated in warfare on a constant and permanent basis rather than as mere substitutes for an absent man. In addition, the range of their activities demonstrates that medieval military leadership went far beyond leading troops on the battlefield.

The temporal range of this study allows a picture to emerge of changes to noblewomen’s experiences as military leaders over time. Surprisingly, their military authority was not overly affected by the shifts identified as important to the survival of women’s political power (such as primogeniture, increasing royal centralization, or life stage). Instead, noblewomen’s military authority rested on the same bases as that of men – access to possession of land (in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) and access to possession of a noble office (in the thirteenth century). Similarly, the growing professionalization and increasing costs of warfare that have been identified as detrimental to the military opportunities of women did NOT remove all noblewomen from power but did restrict military leadership to the elite noblewomen, as it did for noblemen.