This book discusses the changing social impression of women's voices as expressed in late fourteenth century Anglo-French texts. Together the essays that comprise this book offer evidence for three closely related arguments: that the ideology of late medieval gender roles as articulated in Anglo-French texts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries outlined important roles for women's voice and agency in supporting the larger polity as well as the smaller household; that the acceptance and the value of those roles diminished as models of polity in both church and state in England changed in the early modern period; that to see evolution merely in terms of gender roles is to miss the vital link between the status of women and the political construction of individual relationship to authority.