THE GENESIS OF this project dates back to a multi-disciplinary conference on the Roman de Silence organized by Regina Psaki at the University of Oregon. I was intrigued not only by the plot, but also that it was written in the Picard dialect, as Picardy and its northern neighbours had a series of women who inherited counties and other lord-ships. The thirteenth-century Arthurian verse romance by Heldris de Cornüalle, with its unique gender-bending plot and its theme of just governance and lordship, juxtaposed the literary and lived reality of gender and power. As a political historian, I was struck by the author's use of gender imagery in exploring the nature of lordship. Through the use of ambiguity and the manipulation of gender stereotypes, Heldris offers a model of political and personal lordship which is founded upon consultation, consent, and self-restraint. While the poet's portrayal of the characteristics of good lordship is in many senses conventional, his hero(ine) and the parallels drawn between lordship and marriage affirm an unorthodox notion that women should play an active role in both governance and marriage.

The poet's unapologetic presentation of his hero(ine) as the best knight and jongleur in England and France proffers a critique of social norms by illustrating the performative nature of gender, and an indirect affirmation of the successful rule of the region's inheriting countesses. As such, the romance also implicitly defends the established Aristotelian gender continuum against the new gender model which posited men and women as binary complements. For Heldris, women who were on the “masculine” end of the spectrum could wield power wisely and well. Although the Roman de Silence is unique in style and plot, the poet's contemporaries also present competent and powerful women in medieval fabliaux which routinely mock societal hierarchies and conventions. These fictional presentations of capable and commanding women accord well with the evidence of elite women's behaviour of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Lordly women were not unfeminine nor unfamiliar to society. Heldris's plot of a king who forbade female inheritance (and by extension lordship), as Sharon Kinoshita has argued, was a critique of Philip II of France's interference in inheritance practices and aristocratic power.