For all the excellent work that has been done in recent years illuminating the lives of young medieval women, scholarship has been remarkably silent on the relationship between fathers and their adult daughters. Partly this is simply because of the already outlined paucity of work on fathers in general, and partly this is because of the intellectual and political frameworks within which analysis of young women has taken place. Unsurprisingly, much of this work has been within the field of women's studies, and examining the relationships between medieval women has been a way of reclaiming women's history from patriarchal narratives. Understandably, there has been a greater interest in the relationship between women – particularly mothers and daughters – than between fathers and daughters. But for the scholar interested in patriarchal structures the father–daughter relationship is vital because it is the most extreme of the medieval family, representing absolute opposites in terms of gender, age and power. Joel Rosenthal has argued that patri-lineage and patriarchy were of such importance that they shaped the function and self-identity of the individuals within them. The fashioning aspect of paternal authority – not just of offspring, but also of parent – is an idea in vital need of discussion.