Female leadership and male submission the order of Fontevraud in twelfth-century France

In the early twelfth century the wandering preacher Robert of Arbrissel established the monastery of Fontevraud in western France and settled his mixed-sex group of followers there. Fontevraud included both women's and men's houses with an abbess in authority over both. While Robert returned to preaching, the women who led Fontevraud during its establishment and growth supervised fund-raising, construction, estate-management, and relations with surrounding lay and church communities. Analysis of the charter evidence demonstrates that they maneuvered adeptly within interrelated networks of blood, affinity, and feudal ties, using their own connections to elicit ever-more-important supporters, up to popes and kings of both France and England. They engaged bishops and archbishops throughout France to assist in building a system of dozens of daughter-houses obedient to Fontevraud. Their shrewd understanding of the amorphous nature of property-holding at the time led them to involve as many interested parties as possible in property transfers to Fontevraud in order to forestall future disputes. When forethought failed, they vigorously protected Fontevraud's interests in lay and ecclesiastical courts and by enlisting powerful lords to negotiate and apply pressure on Fontevraud's behalf.;This study also contradicts earlier historians' claims that Fontevraud's early female leaders subverted Robert's intentions and undermined the rigor of the Fontevrist way of life. Close examination of successive versions of Robert's statutes for the house demonstrate that after his death Fontevraud's abbesses upheld and even strengthened his ideals.;In all these activities, Fontevraud's abbesses served, and were accepted, as lords in the overwhelmingly male milieu in which they operated. The sources also reveal women from many levels of society acting on their own behalf, claiming family property alienated without their consent or donating property to the nuns themselves. A critical lesson of Fontevraud's apparently unusual combining of nuns and brothers into the same monasteries under a woman's authority is that powerful church and lay authorities found these qualities literally unremarkable. This study complicates the historiographical claim that women's power to control property and opportunities for women religious declined dramatically during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.