Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms

By Lucy K. Pick

In Her Father's Daughter, Lucy K. Pick considers a group of royal women in the early medieval kingdoms of the Asturias and of León-Castilla; their lives say a great deal about structures of power and the roles of gender and religion within the early Iberian kingdoms. Pick examines these women, all daughters of kings, as members of networks of power that work variously in parallel, in concert, and in resistance to some forms of male power, and contends that only by mapping these networks do we gain a full understanding of the nature of monarchical power.

Pick's focus on the roles, possibilities, and limitations faced by these royal women forces us to reevaluate medieval gender norms and their relationship to power and to rethink the power structures of the era. Well illustrated with images of significant objects, Her Father's Daughter is marked by Pick's wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses liturgy, art, manuscripts, architecture, documentary texts, historical narratives, saints' lives, theological treatises, and epigraphy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501714337

Lucy K. Pick

Lucy K. Pick is Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Conflict and Coexistence and the novel Pilgrimage.

Book preview

HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

GENDER, POWER, AND RELIGION IN THE EARLY SPANISH KINGDOMS

LUCY K. PICK

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For my father, in memory, from my sister and me

ifig0001 CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Visigothic Inheritance, Asturian Monarchy

2. Virgins and Martyrs

3. Networks of Property, Networks of Power

4. Memory, Gift, and Death

Looking Forward, Looking Beyond

Works Cited

Index

ifig0001 FIGURES

1. Map of the Iberian Peninsula

2. Eleventh-century kings of León and Castilla

3. Royal succession in the Asturias

4. Visigothic succession according to Asturian historiography

5. Plaque with the Journey to Emmaus and Noli me tangere

6. Urraca Fernández’s diploma restoring the see of Túy

7. Detail of Urraca Fernández’s diploma

8. Relationships among nobles in Urraca Fernández’s diploma for Túy

9. Tenth-century Leonese genealogy

10. Abbess Guntroda and the Leonese royal family

11. Abbess Guntroda and Rodrigo Velásquez

12. Puerta de San Esteban, Great Mosque of Córdoba, and north door of San Martiño de Pazó

13. Map of places named in Elvira Fernández’s will of 1099

14. Reliquary casket of Saints Adrian and Natalia

15. Arca Santa of Oviedo

16. Chalice of Urraca Fernández

ifig0001 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of inspiring reads, late-night conversations, fortuitous archival discoveries, enlightening conference presentations, and many hours of patient friends taking time to read my work and think through it with me. All this has left me debts of gratitude that I gladly acknowledge. My first thanks are due to the faculty reading group I joined in 2004, which included, over time, Daisy Delogu, Lisa Voigt, Rebecca Zorach, Nicole Lassahn, and Cecily Hilsdale, and which later morphed into the Pre-Modern Body Project, expanding to add Niall Atkinson, Ryan Giles, Aden Kumler, and Jonathan Lyons. All contributed their knowledge and counsel to sections of this book. Daisy wins the prize for reading the whole thing, and Cecily wins another for getting me to read Annette Weiner and teaching me how to take photographs of buildings. The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at the University of Chicago provided generous financial and logistical support for the Pre-Modern Body Project. My service as the interim faculty director of CSGS while I put the finishing touches on this book was possible only because of our wonderful staff, Gina Olson, Sarah Tuohey, and Tate Brazas. Friends at my usual institutional home, the Divinity School, kept me pointed in the right direction and inspired me to think in new ways about the role of religion in medieval culture. I am grateful to the dean, Richard Rosengarten, for his many years of support and for making possible the lovely image on the cover. Special thanks are due to Bruce Lincoln, whose reading of a languishing part of this project encouraged me to keep going. Parts of this book began life as a string of conference talks. I am especially grateful to Susan Boynton at Columbia University; Suzanne Conklin Akbari at University of Toronto; Bretton Rodriguez at Notre Dame; and Therese Martin at CSIC, Madrid, for inviting me to speak at their institutions. Miriam Shadis and James D’Emilio both graciously read chapter 3, and I benefitted greatly from their wisdom and expertise.

Early research for this project was undertaken in Spain through the Spanish Program for Cultural Cooperation (now, Hispanex). The librarians and archivists at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Archivo Historico Nacional, Universidad de Salamanca, El Escorial, British Library, San Isidoro de León, and the cathedral of León generously gave me access to their materials. Particular thanks are due to Avelino Bouzón Gallego, the canon archivist of the cathedral of Túy. He not only gave me permission to use photographs of its splendid charter; he also, as parish priest of San Bartolomeu in Rebordáns, the eleventh-century church that was its original cathedral after the see was refounded by Urraca Fernández, unlocked the church for us and showed us its marvels, including the Roman tiles in the crypt.

I am grateful to Peter Potter, who saw the potential in this project, and to Mahinder Kingra, who picked it up for Cornell University Press. The book is better for the suggestions made by the two readers for the press, who read with care and generosity. Bethany Wasik, Susan Specter, and Julie Nemer have done everything they could to make sure the book is beautiful and free of errors—I take responsibility for any that remain. Bill Nelson produced the lovely maps. The photograph of Urraca Fernández’s chalice is in this book only thanks to the patience and tenacity of Robbi Siegal at Art Resource.

I want to thank my mother, Sheila O’Connor, for her pride in me, which has never wavered since the day I was born. She taught me to believe that what I could accomplish was limited only by my imagination. My sister Deedee is my best friend and my biggest cheerleader, as I am hers, and the love of her and her family, Thomas, Evie, and Willem, propels me. I thank my son, Leo Allen, who makes everything worthwhile, and my husband, Michael Kremer, who makes everything easy. Finally, I recall my father, Michael Pick, who died in 1987 and in whose memory I offer, with my sister, this book as a gift. May his memory be a blessing.

ifig0001 ABBREVIATIONS

Figure 1. Map of the Iberian Peninsula

FIGURE 1. Map of the Iberian Peninsula

Introduction

On June 13, 1071, royal daughter Urraca Fernández refounded the bishopric of Túy on the banks of Miño river in the far west corner of what had been her father’s kingdom. The diocese had been vacant for decades after the depredations of Viking raiders along the Atlantic coast. All-powerful Maker of all things, strong King of the ages, her diploma begins, addressing God as supreme male monarch. This leads into a narrative of the destruction of the see of Túy: From the report of ancients, we know that all Spain was held by the Christians and adorned by bishops in ecclesiastical sees in every province. A short time later, with sin ever-growing, the sea coast was overthrown by the race of the Vikings, and the bishop of the see of Túy, who held rule in that place, was taken by those enemies, and all his people captured. Some were killed; some were sold. The city was reduced to nothing, and remained widowed and miserable for many years. After this lengthy exordium, which imagines Túy in losing its bishop as a woman who has lost her husband, Urraca donated a series of properties to Túy and its new bishop that would provide the see with a landed economic base and fund the construction of a new cathedral.¹

The charter was confirmed by bishops, abbots, and other clergy, counts, royal officials, and her brother, Alfonso VI (1065–1109). Her refounding of Túy recalls earlier royal diplomas, such as that in which her ancestor, King Alfonso II (791–842), refounded the see of Oviedo in 812 or, more recently, one in which another brother of Urraca, Sancho II, king of Castilla (1065–1072), restored the see of Oca.²

Urraca Fernández’s charter belongs to a specific political context. While Sancho II ruled in Castilla and Alfonso VI ruled in León since their father’s death in 1065, a third brother, García, held sway in Galicia, the western kingdom where Túy was located. Beset by rebellious local nobles, García’s rule over his allotted kingdom was never fully secure. His final known act as king was to begin the process of restoring the see of Túy by making his own donation to its bishop on February 1, 1071, four months before his sister Urraca completed that task. Unlike her charter, García’s gift was meager and poorly subscribed.³ Between that date and Urraca’s own gift, his siblings relieved him of his kingdom, putting it under the joint rule of Alfonso VI and Sancho II.⁴ Urraca’s charter to Túy represented her own acceptance of the new state of affairs in Galicia.

By what authority did she, a woman, perform this public act, restoring the bishopric of Túy? Urraca was neither married to a king nor the mother of a king too young to rule and so serving in his stead. Rather, she was childless and unmarried, a servant of God, as she declares in this diploma.⁵ Her involvement in the refounding of Túy, an act with both political and spiritual ramifications, neither at this level seen traditionally as the domain of women in this period, is startling to us. Equally startling is the fact that her activities do not seem to have surprised her contemporaries.

Urraca begat a long medieval and post-medieval literary tradition of ballads and romanceros that explained her unusual role in her father’s and brothers’ kingdoms as a function of her supposedly uniquely aggressive and bold personality. They describe her as a charismatic figure: passionate, seductive, manipulative, a cruel temptress, and treacherous and murderous because of her presumed role in the eventual death of her brother, Sancho II. She was even accused of committing incest with Alfonso VI, of marrying him and becoming his queen as a way retaining power when he took sole control over their father’s empire.⁶ Nonetheless, Urraca’s role cannot be explained by recourse to a narrative of an exceptional personality who was able to transcend the usual gender roles, the traditional medieval explanation for women who exercised power beyond expectations and one still evident in popular biography,⁷ because we see her younger sister, Elvira Fernández, occupying the same kind of political space as Urraca. And we cannot account for the activity of these women simply by arguing that it comes during a moment of particular stress and division. Urraca and Elvira continued to appear at the side of their brother Alfonso VI, confirming his documents and supporting his policies, as well as issuing documents of their own, after he claimed sole rule over the whole of his father’s kingdom in 1072.⁸

Urraca and her siblings were all the children of King Fernando I (1037–1065) and Queen Sancha (d. 1067) of León-Castilla (figure 2). Urraca was the eldest, born before her parents attained the throne.⁹ Fernando I made provisions to divide the kingdom upon his decease among his three sons and gave all the monasteries of the kingdom to his two daughters, in which they might live all the days of their life without the bonds of marriage.¹⁰ The bequest to his two daughters begins to explain Urraca’s gift to Túy. Granting the monasteries of the kingdom to the daughters provided them with a significant and substantial territorial and economic base that spanned all three kingdoms given to the sons. The sisters were lords of these monasteries, not the possessions of them. This kind of inherited property constituted a good part of the material resources held by all the women studied in this book. Urraca made the grant to Túy, one that dwarfed the earlier one given by García, because it was she, not any of her brothers, who had the resources to do so.

Figure 2. Eleventh-century kings of León and Castilla

FIGURE 2. Eleventh-century kings of León and Castilla

The sisters were not the only royal daughters of the early Spanish kingdoms who could draw on resources such as these to act politically. Their role foreshadowed that of their great-niece, Sancha Raimúndez (d. 1159), the unmarried daughter of Queen Urraca, who appeared regularly beside her younger brother Alfonso VII (1123–1157), supporting his rule.¹¹ And Urraca and Elvira Fernández were preceded by their own female ancestors, also unmarried, who maintained a prominence that demands exploration. These earlier women include Urraca and Elvira’s own great-aunts, who, like them, were the daughters and sisters of a king; Elvira Ramírez, the sister of Sancho I (956–958 and 960–966), who ruled for Sancho’s minor son on his death;¹² Jimena Ordóñez, the aunt of Elvira Ramírez, who confirmed the documents of her royal father; and all the way back to Adosinda in the distant eighth century, the daughter, sister, and half-sibling of kings. Adosinda passed the throne to her husband, and when he died, she became a consecrated widow and ensured that her nephew could take the throne. Nor were active royal sisters and daughters confined to the kingdom of León-Castilla. Closely contemporary with Urraca and Elvira Fernández was their cousin, Countess Sancha Ramírez, also the daughter and sister of kings. After her husband died, she remained closely associated with the rule of her brother Sancho I (1063–1094) and frequently confirmed the diplomas of her nephew Pedro I (1094–1104).¹³ The daughters and sisters of counts in the Iberian peninsula likewise possessed lordship over religious property and large domains within their own families, which brought them influence akin to these royal daughters.

More consideration needs to be given to what structures, roles, and people constituted the ruling system of these realms; how it varied in the Iberian peninsula, across Latin Christendom, and over time; and in what ways power was articulated through it.¹⁴ As is evident from the sources cited in the preceding paragraphs, some of these women have received the attention of individual studies of their actions and roles. Taken separately, however, it is too easy to view each as an anomaly, and her activities and power as exceptional, founded in personal charisma or particular circumstances. Studied as a group, however, it becomes clear that these women were as integral a part of the ruling system as the king, his wife, his eldest male heir, and the male nobility, figures who have received somewhat more attention.

In this book, I consider the evidence for the actions of royal daughters of early medieval Iberia, a place that they, especially those from the kingdoms of León and Castilla, at the heart of this study, would have known as Hispania (Spain), from the Roman name for the peninsula.¹⁵ Focusing attention on their roles, possibilities, and limitations compels us to reevaluate medieval gender norms and their relationship to power. At the same time, understanding the forces that brought these women the power they held, and how those forces could change, requires us to rethink medieval power structures as a whole and results in a fresh understanding of monarchical power, its extent, and its means of deployment in medieval Europe. These power structures were multiple. They stemmed from different and sometimes competing sources of power, such as property, gender, charisms of royalty or nobility, religious authority, military command, and family dynamics, and they interacted in varied ways. Each consisted of a set of rules or cultural norms—procedures, metaphors, scenarios, and assumptions that are applied in the enactment or reproduction of social life—as well as actual resources, both human and material, such as the monastic property possessed by the women at the heart of this study.¹⁶ One key power structure for these women was the religious role they fulfilled within the kingdom, which in turn shaped their place within the royal family. This role and the norms that governed it, and the massive property they held because of it, intersected with other notions, such as ideas about the family and the importance of lineage, matrilineal traditions in the region in which they emerged, and customs about inheritance, to create the sometimes contradictory forces that organized their lives. They were members of a larger group that included the king himself, the rest of the royal family, senior nobles and churchmen, and others, who all participated in power structures of their own. We discover a corporate monarchy involving networks of power in which royal women had a central position.

What does it mean to say that women such as Urraca and Elvira Fernández were powerful, and what is the relationship of power to other notions, such as authority and agency? One influential approach has been to expand the notion of power beyond that of simple public authority, investigating instead the capacity of medieval women to act effectively, to influence people or decisions, and to achieve goals.¹⁷ In effect, this redefines power as agency, which implies the existence of an agent, an acting subject. But this poses a problem for medievalists because we are told by experts in other periods that the Middle Ages was a time of limited or rare subjectivity. Christianity, it is argued, is the means by which individuality emerged in the medieval West, in reaction to and rejection of holistic society, but in the Middle Ages, this was as yet an otherworldly individuality, existing in relationship to God and His vicars on earth, and then only insofar as it rejected the world. It was not yet the full flourishing of the individual in the world; for that we have to await the Renaissance and the Reformation.¹⁸ The medieval subject, we are told, was only the Christian subject; that is to say, only in his or her filial relation to God can we identify individual subjectivity, a sense of a self, in the Middle Ages. And even these subjects were not yet autonomous but instead found their full realization only through the Church.¹⁹

This may explain why some of the most interesting and ground-breaking theoretical work on the agency of medieval women has hitherto been done not about women in their relationship to political power but, rather, in their capacity as Christian speaking subjects, especially as mystics who wrote (or who were written for). It is in their articulation of a legible, speaking self, an Ego that exists in relation to God in whose image they were created, that we find medieval, even female, subjects. Agency is implicitly defined as the ability to write or, at least, to compose text. This explains the anxiety expressed in some studies about who exactly was responsible for composing the works that appear under their names—the women or their male amanuenses.²⁰ When women do not themselves write—but are written about—they vanish, at least under this perspective.²¹ It is perhaps no coincidence that medieval historians, whose power and prestige depend on our ability to produce written texts under our names, define this act of writing as the apex of agency. But it should perhaps caution us that we may be projecting anxieties about our own sense of self-worth and fears of a lack of agency onto the past.

Moreover, there is another medieval figure apart from the speaking Christian to whom modern scholars are willing to ascribe subjectivity and agency, albeit implicitly, namely the medieval king. Narratives of medieval political history can read like royal biographies in which all attention is placed on the king, and his strength or weakness as king is measured by how well he managed to exert his will because modern scholars emulate Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne²² in attributing all the events of the reign of their subject to his agency. Scholars who may not think of themselves as caring much for ideas such as subjectivity but are interested, rather, in institutions such as lordship, equating it with power,²³ seem in search of a figure with a will and the means to exert it, who can serve as an acting subject within our modern understanding of subjectivity. Their longing for this individual acting subject obscures the contributions of others to his rule, including the contributions of medieval women.

Was lordship something a woman could ever possess in the Middle Ages? Georges Duby argues that, because of their inability to wield the sword, women lacked the ability to command and punish: By nature, because she was a woman, the woman could not exercise public power. She was incapable of exercising it.²⁴ Duby’s exclusion of women from public power relies on assumptions about the ubiquity and fixity of the public and private spheres, gendered respectively male and female, that are highly problematic. He articulates these assumptions in the foreword to the first volume of his History of Private Life:

At all times and in all places a clear, commonsensical distinction has been made between the public—that which is open to the community and subject to the authority of its magistrates—and the private. In other words, a clearly defined realm is set aside for that part of existence for which every language has a word equivalent to private, a zone of immunity to which we may fall back or retreat, a place where we may set aside arms and armour needed in the public place, relax, take our ease, and lie about unshielded by the ostentatious carapace worn for protection in the outside world. This is the place where the family thrives, the realm of domesticity.²⁵

Or, as he put it more succinctly when writing about women and power, Private life was women’s business.²⁶

The division of power into public (or male) and private (or female) spheres is one way that historians have accounted for powerful medieval women, in arguments that kings held public power while queens held private power through their roles as the wives and then mothers of kings. The source of power for both kings and queens derived ultimately from genealogy in this view, from their lineage. When queens exercised something like public power, it was by means of this private role, in a transfer of private power to the public sphere, for example, when they acted as regents for minor children.²⁷ But these explanations do not account for cases in which the woman in question was not the wife of a king but the daughter or sister. Likewise, a sharp distinction between public and private is not a very useful way of differentiating power in the Middle Ages, a period when what we now think of as public and private were thoroughly interpenetrated. Public and private are discursive categories that make an argument for who has the right to what kind of power and where, and they have a history that must be interrogated, not assumed.²⁸

Numerous scholars depict women exercising something that looks an awful lot like public power, including military command, in different times and places during the Middle Ages,²⁹ and in this study, I expand that picture. But force, or the threat of force, is not the only channel through which power can flow. Power resides in influence, in the ability to grant or withhold material benefits or rewards, and in the leveraging of traditions, norms, and social expectations, all channels that were accessible to the women in this study.³⁰ The question is not whether women exercised power; it is how and why. These women are frequently given the title domina in contemporary documents, a term that requires interpretation. For Duby, the noble woman’s title of domina (lady) was an honorific derived from her husband’s status as dominus (lord),³¹ and indeed in English, lady carries connotations of this derived status along with implications of passivity and gentility, none of which have much bearing on these women, who did not derive power from their husbands and were anything but passive. Accordingly, I leave the title untranslated and gloss it as referring to female lordship.

Moreover, the lordship of the king needs to be complicated further. The fantasy of autonomy and illusion of independence for the royal dominus elide the king’s participation in a host of networks of relationship, networks that combine to support his power. As Norbert Elias has shown for a later period, even in the age of absolutism, kingly power, although represented as a gift from God alone, depended in fact on the working in concert of a whole court of people, drawn together in networks of interdependencies, in which the king himself was likewise enmeshed.³² Medieval kings likewise relied on a range of people, including nobles and ecclesiastics as well as members of their own family, to exert authority, that is to say, power that was socially sanctioned.³³ Power should not be thought of as a substance or a property, a thing; rather, it is most usefully understood as the relationship between individuals that allows some to determine the conduct of others.³⁴ Theresa Earenfight suggests that monarchy must be always be construed as a multiplicity of different power relations that are not independent of each other. Monarchy is not simply rule by one person; it is both a political structure in which multiple actors have roles, albeit unequal ones, and also a powerful kin group organized as a dynasty. The relationship of king to queen, she argues, is that of an unequal political and dynastic partnership whose nature varies in different times and places, and this is true for the king’s whole family.³⁵

It is misguided, then, to imagine the king as the ultimate free, sovereign subject with perfect agency and to measure everyone else’s power according to this yardstick. Everyone, from the king to his daughters and sisters to the meanest slave, was constrained by the structures in which each lived, by the networks of people in which they were enmeshed, and by the access to resources and the norms and discourses that shaped their roles. The key is to identify the multiple and sometimes contradictory structures that shaped their lives, to explore how they interpreted and mobilized the resources available to them, and to uncover how they transposed and extended into new contexts the norms that bound them. These new contexts allowed them to leverage and so reshape their position in the networks to which they belonged. We can locate the agency of these women, and find possibilities for change in their capacity to interpret, mobilize, and transpose within structures that are processes, not static fixed entities.³⁶

One of the structures through which monarchical power was wielded is the family, and this fact makes the question of how gender affects and structures these networks of power pressing. A court has women as regular members of it in a way that other spaces of power, such as a battlefield, might not.³⁷ Attention to gender is a crucial part of the organization of hierarchy, and gender is one of the primary fields through which and by means of which power is expressed. Notions of gender are connected to theories about power, whether attention to gender is explicit (e.g., in laws saying that women are not allowed to rule) or implicit (e.g., in rhetorical strategies suggesting power is inherently masculine). The ways that women are represented (and the places where they are ignored) in different media belong to discourses about what power is and who holds power. They are part of the fictions that naturalize power as inherently belonging to the king. As Joan Scott puts it, Hierarchical structures rely on generalized understandings of the so-called natural relationships between male and female, understandings that are historically constructed, discursively produced, and thus subject to change and transformation.³⁸

Several exemplary studies provide useful models for understanding how gender helped structure medieval networks of power. Constance Brittain Bouchard’s Those of my Blood provides evidence for networks among the noble families of France and Germany, and her understanding of the way these networks were moderated and affected by gender suggests new ways of thinking about the Iberian royal families. For Bouchard, the medieval noble family was not a self-evident unit but, rather, a construct in a state of flux. Who was considered a member of one’s family was constantly subject to reinterpretation and redefinition. A family consisted of a fluid set of relationships, a network of kinship links, whose meaning was different for each of its members. For instance, to a man, his wife might be something of an interloper and a newcomer to the family. That man’s son, however, will consider his own mother an integral part of his lineage.³⁹ Bouchard demonstrates that to understand the workings of powerful families we must investigate the roles women played in them. A powerful family is not something that can be understood from simply looking at its male members, even though the autonomy and power of its male heads may be what initially draws our attention. Looking at where women fit into Iberian royal families does not merely add new actors to the stage; it changes the way we view early Iberian power, monarchy, and family as a whole. Bouchard finds the power of a man’s wife increases toward the end of her period.⁴⁰ I suggest that, in fact, this wife’s power may have come at the expense of the man’s aunt, sister, or daughter.

Janet Nelson pays welcome attention to the roles played by Charlemagne’s sisters and daughters, as well as his wives. She presents evidence for what we find in a slightly later period in León and Castilla—sisters who had leading roles in religious life, daughters who remained single but were deeply embedded in the rituals of court life, and women who made up liturgical networks linking heaven and earth through their prayers. Charlemagne’s own sister, Gisela, was the abbess of Chelles, which was not only a site for learning and manuscript study but also a center of the royal religious cult and, at the same time, a political center from and to which both news and the powerful traveled.⁴¹ Nelson shows that the powers wielded by royal women such as Charlemagne’s daughters depended on the individual’s location in the whole network of the court. From the emperor’s perspective, what power they held stemmed solely from their relationship to him and was dependent on his survival. But from the perspective of the members of the court who desired access to the emperor, their power was enormous: they had intimate access to their father that other courtiers could only dream of; they became crucial channels of patronage and information; and by choosing sides or bestowing favor, they could shape politics. As dependent daughters, they were the one group Charlemagne could count on to be totally loyal to him.⁴²

Kings in Spain likewise extended their power beyond their own reach by means of family members—their unmarried sisters and daughters, who, because they were unmarried, owed their only allegiance to them. Gayle Rubin has emphasized the notion that marriage is a form of gift exchange in which women are used to create relationships between men.⁴³ The transactional nature of medieval royal marriages to create alliances and weave peace is evident and explicit. But what does it mean when a king such as Charlemagne or Fernando I chose to receive women as wives but did not gift his own daughters, when he received women as gifts but did not himself make such gifts? What did he, and the women, gain and lose?

Annette Weiner has critiqued the views of Rubin and others who view marriage as a relationship between men in which women are simply objects to be exchanged, arguing that what we interpret as a norm of reciprocal giving, in which one woman is exchanged for another, is simply one strategy for dealing with what, for her, is the more basic problem of keeping-while-giving. Weiner identifies a class of possessions that she describes as inalienable. These are objects that are symbolically invested with more authority and information about identity, kinship, and political history than other kinds of possessions. They are unique, like a crown. The possession of such a charged object and the meanings it carried created difference and hierarchy, not equivalence, and what Weiner calls cosmological authentication of the power of its owner; therefore, its owner would go to great lengths to avoid giving it away. The reciprocal exchanges that anthropologists and historians have paid so much attention to are, in her view, always made in reference to and in awareness of those inalienable possessions that are not being exchanged. Thus, reciprocity is always motivated by its opposite: the desire to keep something back.⁴⁴ Giving is easy to do; keeping what you have is much harder. So, for instance, however much land a king grants his followers in return for whatever loyalty or service he might receive from them in return, he avoids at all costs granting them the land that makes him king (i.e., granting land to them in the way he holds it that makes him king). Their exchanges with him are always made in full awareness of exactly what he will not give away, and the difference between him and them that what is kept behind both creates and demonstrates. For a king who is in control of what he gives, his gifts do not diminish what he holds but, rather, the reverse, as Stephen White shows, paraphrasing from the prose Launcelot, Always give plenty and you will have plenty to give for everything you give will remain in your land and the wealth of many other lands will come to you.⁴⁵

I argue that, like land and crowns, the daughters that kings did not give away in marriage alliances were inalienable possessions. As we see throughout the course of this book, these daughters carried the symbolic markers of lineage, sacred authority, memory, and gift that are characteristic of inalienable possessions and that served as part of the cosmological authentication that helped authorize the rule of their fathers and brothers. Although Weiner herself does not talk about people as inalienable possessions, my identification is supported by the way she links human with cultural reproduction as the same kind of activity. Women worked in both spheres, and this provided them space and authority in political hierarchies, as for instance, when a queen gave birth to royal children. As people, not objects, these women did not, however, operate in the same way as a feather cape or a reliquary chest. These women were themselves also capable of both keeping and giving, and they did so in their own interests and in the interests of their family, using donation to deploy memory and compensate for death.

Weiner’s ethnographic study, done on a very different place and time than my own historical investigation, was motivated by some of the same paradoxes and questions. We both observe the undeniable presence of women exerting authority in societies in which the norm of reciprocity would teach us that they should be reduced to trade objects, and we share suspicions of the way the acceptance of the norm of reciprocity has reified and gendered public and private as male and female, respectively. We both locate the source for some of the power we see women possessing in the bond between brother and sister, and in the way that this bond gave a brother some access to the sacred that he would not have without her, a bond that persisted after marriage for the women whom Weiner studied and that did not have to compete with a sister’s marriage in my study.

The connection these royal daughters and sisters had with the sacred was a key part of their roles. The properties these women held were not simply villas and vineyards, units of economic production; rather, they were monasteries and churches, institutions with a specifically religious role, symbolism, and history, and which together supported the authority of the king and the kingdom. These ecclesiastical properties inherited by the daughters formed what would come to be known by the twelfth century as the infantazgo, a collection of religious institutions held by and passed down to royal daughters and sisters who lived unmarried. Patrick Henriet, who has done the most thorough investigation of this phenomenon thus far, dates the origins of this phenomenon to the tenth century, but as we will see, its origins are older and may date as early as Adosinda in the ninth century.⁴⁶ Some scholars view the infantazgo primarily as an economic and legal institution, a type of lordship designed to preserve royal property within the family and allow royal daughters to remain unmarried, but Henriet correctly identifies a sacred dimension to the role of these women, although he does not elaborate on what this was or what its origins might be.⁴⁷ What that religious role was, how it connected to the property they held, and what kinds of authority and agency it might have given these king’s daughters and sisters deserves further exploration.

In my view, the infantazgo is best understood not simply or primarily as a legal category of property or as a construct of ownership created by the king to allow him to exert control. Rather, it should be seen as another part of the inalienable possessions of the royal family, whose possession by its likewise inalienable royal daughters provided