Male Authors and Female Authority in the Medieval Military Sphere

It is no secret that medieval society agreed that warfare was a masculine activity, and yet nineteen bellicose women appear in the pages of just five northern French chroniclers from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Rather than castigate these women for performing masculine roles, chroniclers utilized commonly held tropes of women’s motives for fighting (good women fight to defend the family; bad women fight for themselves) to bolster their own political and personal writing agendas.  Thus, a chronicler would denigrate a countess who opposed the intended patron of the chronicle, while an author from the countess’s own county would portray her positively. 

By presenting both positive and negative examples of bellicose women, albeit within stereotypes, the authors altogether ignored the opportunity to create or confirm masculine superiority in the military sphere.  They also passed up the chance to mold these noblewomen into foils behind which the clerics (for all of these five writers were clerics) could tear down the male aristocrats’ authority.  Instead, the chroniclers’ promotion of their own authorial agendas produced, perhaps unintentionally, the idea that military leadership, though gendered male, was really a role for any noble, regardless of biological sex.  A woman moving “up” the gender continuum to masculinity was not always viewed positively but not because it was wrong for a woman to perform a masculine task.  If, as members of the nobility (i.e.: the warrior “class”), women could fight, then gender roles were less about people and their biological sex than about the social status of the individual and the gender of the role itself.  In other words, in Northern French medieval society, an activity had a fixed gender – masculine or feminine – while a person’s gender was adaptable to the situation.