1. This understanding of her obligation as a ruler was not unique, as suggested by William Chester Jordan’s discussion of the various ways piety informed Louis IX’s approach to governance. See W.C. Jordan, “Isabelle of France and Religious Devotion at the Court of Louis IX,” in Capetian Women, ed. Kathleen Nolan (New York, 2003), pp. 209–224.
2. In the words of Miriam Shadis, “the goals of patronage and politicking were to establish self and family-as well as to please God.” Miriam Shadis, “Piety, Politics, and Power: The Patronage of Leonor of England and Her Daughters Berenguela of Leon and Blanche of Castile,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Georgia, 1996), p. 213.
3. Joel T. Rosenthal warns against attempts to distinguish between secular and sacred concerns since “the medieval mind (and social conscience) made no distinction between an eventual sacerdotal and a social end of charity.” Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise. Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (London, 1972), pp. 9–10. For a similar discussion, see
4. Emma Cownie, Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1135 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 3–10.
5. See Shadis, “Piety, Politics, and Power,” p. 216; Victoria Chandler, “Politics and Piety: Influences on Charitable Donations during the Anglo-Norman period,” Revue Benedictine 90 (1980): 63–72, p. 64.