Power Brokers in the Family: Medieval Elite Women's Familial Networks

Medieval women exercised considerable political and social agency in the context of familial networks developed through marriage, cousin-ship, and affinity.  This can be demonstrated by the ways in which the women of the extended kinship of William Marshal and Isabella de Clare, earl and countess of Pembroke, engaged in power brokering throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in order to support both close and extended kin in professional ambitions, political maneuvers, and dispute resolutions.  This kind of activity was so ubiquitous among the women of the extended Marshal kin-group that it must suggest that this behavior was unexceptional for, even typical of, elite women of the era.

I will be focusing, for this “lightning session” presentation, on the activities of a group of cousins and cousins-by-marriage who operated in tandem to support members of their kinship sub-group (the co-heirs of Sybil Marshal, daughter of William Marshal and Isabella de Clare and wife of William Ferrers, earl of Derby) against outside incursion as well as in order to promote the professional ambitions of their kin.  Their activities suggest that women in elite families were welcome partners and patrons of male kin, and that their position as the source of patronage and power did not diminish their perceived contributions or denigrate the status of the individuals they patronized.