Chaucer's now-famous reference to the romance of Lancelot and its enthusiastic audience strongly connects medieval women readers with the genre of romance. Taking their cue from this and other medieval references, medievalist critics have for decades pursued the connection between women and romance in the Middle Ages with little regard for how these narratives represent female characters as sites of female authority. Although there are undoubtedly many reasons for the association between women readers and medieval romance, such as the popularity of vernacular literature, including hagiographies, chronicles, and romances, for women readers in the Middle Ages, some scholars have relied on the connection between women and romance to support stereotypical notions about medieval women's reading tastes; the potential escapist and wish-fulfilling content of these narratives is viewed to be geared particularly for a female audience. However, I suggest that romances have more to tell us about the narratives' appeal to female readers. Of medieval genres, none provided more narrative possibility and agency for female characters and, in turn, their female readers.

This study asserts that medieval romances are a central and under-explored site of evidence about representations of women's cultural and social authority – if not always historically enacted, then certainly culturally central – in the Middle Ages. Because it is a didactic as well as an entertaining genre, medieval romance provides influential patterns for female agency.