The concept of ‘power’ is complex. It was long viewed in modern scholarship as purely political and military – the sole preserve of men, and more specifically royal and aristocratic men – in the early medieval period. More recently, ‘power’ has been defined with greater nuance, allowing the study of the power of early medieval women, who only rarely held the more ‘traditional’ forms of power, to progress. Janet Nelson, working on Carolingian Francia, has investigated women’s abilities to control people and lands after their husbands’ deaths, noting that while ‘[t]o claim widows’ at least partial empowerment is not the same thing as to claim women empowered as such’, the word ‘widow’ is gender-specific, and therefore at least some women were empowered. Nelson has also examined queenly roles, arguing that the work of kings and queens was different but complementary, that ‘the queen's performance, active and enactive, maintained the well-functioning, stability and coherence of the realm’, giving her power in her own right. Pauline Stafford too has analysed widows and queens in the eleventh century, as figures who wielded power, though a different form of power to that wielded by men. She has emphasised that ‘with these early queens we are dealing not with female kingship, but with queenship. Queen or empress in their case is not a female king; she is the wife or mother of one’. These are feminine forms of power, distinct from the purely masculine power of kings.

Following this work, this chapter will assess whether there were concepts of ‘feminine’ power in early Ireland. It will examine individual women, and types of women, who are represented as holding power, and distinguish what, if anything, links them. There has been some investigation into feminine power in early Ireland, often focusing on the so-called dichotomy between the power of women represented in literature, and the apparently minimal power of women in ‘reality’. Doris Edel, discussing the comparatively limited evidence for powerful women outside saga literature, has questioned whether ‘a society which in its literature attributes such independence to its woman characters as does much of early Irish literature would on the other hand deny it or rigidly curtail it in real life’.