During the last three decades, research into the history of female aristocracy has led to significant strides being made towards deepening our understanding of the lives and roles of medieval women, notably through exploration of their agency, creativity and advocacy, and increasingly through probing analysis of their private, public and political lives. Whereas in the past, anthologies and studies on noble women, including queens, throughout England and Western Europe were largely focused on rigid periodisation centred on either the early medieval or early modern periods, a particularly fruitful emerging area within this recent burgeoning scholarship is the study of the lives of aristocratic women during the transition between the late medieval and early modern eras. This is the historiographical context for this book.

A significant challenge facing historians working in this field stems from the fact that, as the English medievalist Eileen Power put it, ‘the position of women is one thing in theory, another in legal position, yet another in everyday life’, with the reality for most women being ‘a blend of all three’. Nonetheless, historians (including some focusing on Ireland) have demonstrated that, through the adoption of resourceful strategies in research and interpretation of sources, it is possible to give visibility to aristocratic women who have heretofore been left in the wings of narratives on their families and patrimonies. Among these are historians Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford who, in their study of women in early modern England, emphasise the importance of ‘reading sources against the grain, of asking where women were absent as well as present in the documents’. This new wave of scholarship, together with the development of gender and sexuality studies, is giving rise to a more rounded, balanced representation of the past. In the words of Mary O’Dowd, ‘seeing … women … widens our perception of the whole image’. This is certainly true in the case of the present book which, through its focus on the Ormond women in their multiple and overlapping contexts, highlights their distinctive contributions through their exercise of influence and/or power in various private and public capacities. Indeed, the need for and significance of an enhanced,