The difficulty facing Eileen Power in her Medieval Women – how to treat a large subject in a short book – is even more acute in the case of a short chapter such as this. My first task is to present an abbreviated survey of the range of topics concerning women commonly discussed in the Middle Ages, providing the wider background for the more restricted number of themes taken up in the romances to be considered. Secondly, I focus on the variety of opinions, divergent and even contradictory, that could be held, thus preparing the way for the discussion or debate about women, love and marriage which the authors of these romances hoped to encourage in the vernacular amongst laypeople. The highly selective evidence presented in this chapter covers first the authoritative opinions voiced in the Old and New Testaments, with echoes and deviations in medieval discussion, and secondly the extent of agreement and also opposition between ecclesiastical views and the secular practices of feudal society in the Middle Ages. If this double perspective means omitting other contributory factors, such as medical views about the differences between the sexes, my excuse must be that we thereby move more in the mainstream of medieval thought on these matters.