For much of the modern historiography on medieval women, any woman who exercised any sort of power or influence was considered in some way “extraordinary.” The idea that a noble-born woman could be powerful and influential without qualification was simply not something that most scholars working before 1990 could digest or, in some cases, even recognize. Hence caveats were applied to account for a woman’s power: she was an heiress; she was from a powerful family; she had an “unusual” relationship with her husband or son; she was a powerful personality; she had influential friends. The operating assumption was that for a woman to have power either she or her situation had to be remarkable or unusual. That it was common and accepted for aristocratic women to hold courts, resolve disputes, mete out punishments, make proclamations, have clients, be patrons, command men, or hold office was something that had yet to be acknowledged or assimilated. Thankfully, recent scholarship on aristocratic and royal women has abandoned the equation of “Powerful Woman = Extraordinary” and has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that elite women regularly, mundanely, routinely, exercised power of all sorts.
Amy Livingstone, Recalculating the Equation: Powerful Woman = Extraordinary
