AS ARGUED THROUGHOUT this book, family shaped both men and women's reputation and status through lineage and parage as well as access to power. Elite women's literary, artistic, and religious patronage contributed to their family's status through commemorative donations and performative largesse, courtoisie, and piety. Although these activities are usually considered private, women's patronage of art and material objects also served political goals. By commissioning the Life of St. Ida, the Enfances Godefroi, the Li pater noster, the memorial plaque of Ida I and her crusading sons, and copies of the Pseudo-Turpin, the countesses of Boulogne fostered the family's reputation as deeply pious, successful crusaders, and illustrious descendants of Charlemagne. This image was proliferated by the success of the Old French Crusade Cycle, particularly the Chevalier au Cygne. The gisants of Matthew and Renaud at their tombs (and Matthew's epitaph) celebrated these men as distinguished by their military prowess, courtoisie, and lineage. Similarly, the Boulonnais castles highlighted not only the family's military power, but also its romanitas by use of the spolia and adjacency to the Roman roads. The success of these material and cultural objects can be seen in contemporary, non-Boulonnais sources—Renaud's prowess is celebrated in the History of William Marshal, Ida's courtoisie in Le tournai des dames, Matilda III's planctus, and the city of Boulogne adopting the comital family's heraldic symbol and swan on its seal. Matilda III's marriage into the French royal family added to her family's already royal pedigree (Scottish, Anglo-Norman, and Carolingian) and was proudly displayed in the stained-glass windows and statuary at Chartres Cathedral.

Family was also at the heart of medieval power. Modern conceptions of the family as private in nature has, until recently, played a determining role in evaluating elite women's actions and roles within the realm of power and governance. Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Fonay Wemple established the model in 1973. In the early medieval period, in the absence of powerful kings and institutions, noblewomen had access to power through their membership in aristocratic families. Correspondingly, the rise of centralized administration, formal feudalism, and the revival of Roman (and written) law, they argued, led to women's exclusion, and the designation as “exceptional” for any woman who exercised power after ca. 1000.