Were she not involved directly in any negotiations with stakeholders in the property being granted, it is inconceivable that the person actually responsible for the gift would not have been listed as the donor. Doubtless that would have been a male stakeholder, if Emeline did not have the legal or social right to negotiate for her own case.
Undoubtedly it is the case that the social perceptions of women had a highly traditional and highly moralistic cast to them. Medieval aristocratic marriage and social relations were a matter of property and "social necessity" dominated by men, and women's chastity was the social norm--even though plenty of adultery seems to have occurred. One analysis of courtly love is that it "supported the male-dominated social order rather than subverted it" (Kelly-Gadol 181), even though the object of desire was the chaste woman whose chastity was meant to be intruded upon by the courtly lover, with Guinevere the prototype and other high-born women her proxy. Guinevere's fall, like the fall of such romance figures as Marie d
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