w or revenues" (47).
The very fact that the public record demonstrates the ability of women to dispose of property at their discretion (though, by custom, with the consent of other family members) belies the stereotype of the cloistered secular female. There are several aspects of this, as both Livingstone and Evergates explain. The idea that women might have any discretion at all is completely at odds with the view that they were in the margins of society. Livingstone uses charters, or "records [of] the transfer of property from a lay donor to the church" (47) to support her analysis, in particular citing the efforts of one countess Adela near Chartres to rebuild a monastery in the area that had fallen on hard times and consistent with more general 12th-century efforts at ecclesiastical reform (49). The charter for that project suggests that--whatever her personal motivation--the good lady's undertaking was an autonomous one from a social point of view.
[T]he charters reveal wellborn women of the landholding elite actively involved in diverse familial and lordly activities, with the same rights enjoyed by countess Adela herself at a higher level. Throughout their lives--as daughters, wives, and widows--aristocratic women exercised the powers and responsibilities of the noble-born (Livingstone 50).
Reference to the need for consent of other family members for a woman to dispose of family property might seem to suggest that women did not have complete autonomy when it came to dealing with such property. That would explain, for example, the document regarding Emeline of Chateaudun's gift to the abbey of Marmoutier, which lists the free assent of various witnesses to the gift, namely, male and female relatives (46). However, that the presence of so many assenting witnesses in the document can also be explained as the artifact, or consequence, of a protracted negotiation in which Emeline herself would have been intimately involved....