Fontevraud and the Making of Bourbon France revises and expands my dissertation for publication. Divided into two parts, the first half centers on the order’s unusual gender hierarchy. It shows that scholarship has misunderstood medieval Fontevraud by unwittingly following the historicizing narratives of apologists of abbatial sovereignty written during the seventeenth century. Rather than a place of female rule and ascetic male servitude, medieval Fontevraud was an aristocratic cloister where noble women administrated, while non-noble men catered to their spiritual needs. The study’s second half approaches late medieval Fontevraud from a socio-political perspective and reveals the role of Fontevraud’s 15^th and 16^th-century abbesses in the political rise of the Bourbons. Based on a vast corpus of hitherto unsighted archival material, it ties Fontevraud’s extensive monastic network, governed by five consecutive Bourbon abbesses, to the expansion and consolidation of Bourbon authority in the tumultuous 16^th century.