Over thirty years ago David Herlihy claimed that women between the Carolingian period and the twelfth century played ‘an extraordinary role in the management of family property’. Where Herlihy wrote, cautiously, of women's ‘importance’ and ‘social prominence’, the words often encountered in the more recent historiography are ‘power’ and ‘empowerment’. It may be timely to re-examine women's power over property in a broad context, and also in a narrower one. The present book considers property and power in general. This chapter focusses, first on widows as a particular kind of women, then on a single instance of an aristocratic widow claiming certain powers over property within the specific social context of ninth-century Francia. Gender is a useful category for historians not least because it is a relational term: its use requires, not that we isolate women, but that we analyse complementarity between women and men. For women, when they can be seen, darkly, through the surviving documentary evidence, even when they seem to be acting autonomously, are never acting alone. They appear, above all, in relation to men: biologically, alongside, or against, male kin; sociologically, supported by genuine, or soi-disants, ecclesiastical protectors. Women are deployed as the agents, allies, pawns, of lay kin, and/or of male ecclesiastical communities.

The church looms large in the source material. In the historiography, its role is disputed. Herlihy saw it as protecting and promoting the legal rights of women. Jack Goody has suggested that it deliberately promoted women's capacity to control landed property, so as to benefit, itself, from female generosity.