The cultural and social power of women in the Middle Ages is hard to trace, and evidence for it is scarce; here Vines explores medieval romances as a source of examples of such power. She considers how women functioned as models of cultural and social authority in medieval literary texts through an examination of the influence exerted by female characters in both intellectual and chivalric contexts, and in the exercise of patronage.

Women learned methods of influence from the books they read, in addition to examples set by family connections and socio-political networks. In texts like Troilus and Criseyde and Partenope of Blois, the female reader encounters explicit demonstration of how a woman's intellectual and financial resources can be used to inspire cultural and literary works; literary representations of women's cultural power also reveal a variety of examples of authority from non-material effects to material sway in the medieval patronage system, an influence often unacknowledged in historical and extra-literary sources.