This paper seeks to investigate some of the issues associated with how medieval nunneries were governed, and the question of where power and authority lay within these institutions that were designed to accommodate women who wished to pursue a monastic vocation. Such questions are rather more complex than the same questions asked of male houses, where there was a clearly delineated structure of power and command, defined either in relation to an individual institution (by the Rule of St Benedict) or in relation to wider groupings of individual monasteries into orders. Recent scholarship has emphasized that we should not unquestioningly apply to female houses the same ideas about structure, or organization, as to male houses, and has demonstrated the richness and diversity of the female religious experience. There is, for instance, an ongoing debate about female participation in the Cistercian order: what did medieval people – nuns, monks, bishops, popes, founders of religious houses and their patrons, and so on – mean by a Cistercian nunnery? How – in what ways and to what degree – did Cistercian nunneries follow the observances of the White Monks and the structure of the order? In general, in terms of internal organization the experience in female houses was different from that of male houses in one important respect. Whereas in monasteries we would not expect to find women occupying any positions of authority, in nunneries we might expect to find a male presence.