Gender is a crucial element in the ideology of the chansons de geste since its ethical system is so exclusively masculine. This is not to say that there are no important women characters: for every poem in which women play only minor roles, there is another in which they play a significant part. But in the chansons de geste male characters are defined as individuals in relation to other men, whilst women are excluded from the genre's value system even, arguably, in poems where the influence of other genres is tangible. Many modern critics take this exclusion for granted: for instance it is revealing that in the text of an otherwise fascinating plenary address by François Suard on ‘La chanson de geste comme système de représentation du monde’ delivered to the 1988 international conference of the Société Rencesvals, I can locate no reference to women, even in the section entitled ‘L'Organisation sociale’ (pp. 259–68). Yet is not the exclusion of women from the système de représentation du monde as worthy of mention as the portrayal of the three (male) orders upon which Suard concentrates? The exclusion of women does not, of course, mean that chanson de geste heroes are somehow ungendered; on the contrary it genders them strongly and it has been suggested recently, notably by Sarah Kay, that women are deliberately excluded from the value system of the genre.