CONTESSE, DUCHESSE, MARCHISE, VISCONTESSE:

Historians interested in the origins of the high medieval nobility of France have spent a good deal of time in recent years tracing the ways in which the categorical titles miles, nobilis, and dom(i)nus-dom(i)na (and from about 1125 such vernacular equivalents as cheval[i]er, nob[i]le, sire, messire, and dans-dam[n]e, madame^[1]) were employed to designate and distinguish the members of the highest strata of French society in the period between about 950 and 1250 AD.^[2] For some years now I myself have concentrated my attention on the use between about 1180 and 1500 of a different set of nobiliary titles:^[3] those which, because they designated the holders of what had been the highest offices or dignitates of the sub-Roman régime in France, I call “dignitarial” titles or “titles of dignity,”^[4] and which, because the dignities in question had been converted by 1050 into a form of dominium or territorial

lordship, I have termed “dominical titles of dignity.”^[5] Because I was primarily interested in the titular expression of dominical authority, which in practice was very largely restricted to men, I initially devoted most of my energies to examining the history of the masculine versions of these titles—the cognates and equivalents of the modern English titles “duke,” “marquis,” “count,” and “viscount”—and their abstract derivatives that acquired a territorial sense equivalent to those of the modern English series “duchy,” “marquisate,” and so forth. Recently, however, the corrective rhetoric of some of my feminine (and feminist) colleagues made me realize the error of my ways in thus restricting my attention to masculine titles, and forcibly reminded me of something that I should have considered from the start: that each of my titles eventually gave rise to at least one feminine equivalent, both in Latin and in all of the vernacular languages of Europe.

On consideration of the subject it appeared likely to me that an examination of the early history of these feminine titles in France would shed some light on the nature of the status designated by the masculine version, as well as on the status of the wives, widows, and daughters of the dignitaries who came to share their position in society. I therefore began an investigation of the early history of the forms and use of the feminine titles of dignity that eventually took on a dominical sense, beginning with sources in Latin and moving on to those in the various dialects of Old French and Old Occitan when they began to appear. Given the conservatism of scribes, it is probably safe to assume that vulgar or vernacular versions of most feminine titles appeared in speech some time before their Latin equivalents were put into a written form, but this is of course impossible to prove. So far as I have been able to discover, although various lexicographers and historians have made lists of the earliest attestations of the various titles in question known to them, the questions of when the various titles came into general use, and why they were adopted at those particular times and places, had never been approached in a systematic way. In this paper I shall present the results of a preliminary review of the evidence, in both Latin and French, so far collected by lexicographers^[6] and historians^[7] of the period 750–1200, supplemented by a very partial review of literary works—principally epics—composed in French before about 1200.^[8] From these sources I shall finally draw a few tentative conclusions about the origins and early development of feminine versions of the titles of gubernatorial and dominical dignity.

I should begin with a very rapid review of the history of the masculine forms of the four titles in question. Since no vernacular forms for any of these are attested before about 1125, I shall refer to them for convenience under their Latin forms, which continued to be used throughout the medieval period and beyond. Two of the titles—comes “traveling companion” and dux “leader”—were common nouns in Classical Latin, and only became titles around 300 AD when they were adopted to designate the holders of newly-created dignitates.^[9] Under the Roman Dominate, the title dux designated the holder of a high military office that entailed the command of the forces of a particular province or group of provinces, while comes designated a quasi-official status that could be purely honorific, but could entail military duties either comparable to those of a dux or on the lower level of a single civitas. For complex reasons, out of dozens these titles were the only non-palatine titles of dignity to survive the Germanic conquests of the fifth century in most regions of France,^[10] and they were adopted by the Merovingian kings of the Franks to designate the most important officers of their civil and military administration, roughly equivalent to the Roman duces and comites civitatis. The title dux was also used under the Merovingian and early Carolingian kings to designate the rulers of certain tribes who lived on the fringes of Frankish territory but were only nominally dependant on the Frankish crown. It was thus the oldest of what I have called the “subregal” dominical titles.^[11]

The remaining two masculine titles—vicecomes “vis-count”^[12] and marchio or marchisus (comes) “marquis”^[13] —were invented in the ninth century to designate (in the latter case irregularly and informally) the holders of administrative offices created under Charlemagne: respectively that of deputy to the count, and that of commander of a border region including several counties. Partly out of a desire to employ Classical language, and partly because the marchiones occupied a position roughly equivalent to that of the suppressed dux of the Merovingian period, the scribes of the period commonly referred to the march commanders as duces rather than marchiones or marchisi, and by 900 dux and marchio were virtually synonymous titles, often used in combination and alternation by the handful of men who exercised this office or the dominical authority that derived from it in the two centuries after the final partition of the Frankish empire in 888.^[14]

All four of the titles in question continued to be used by the heirs of the late Carolingian officials who succeeded in converting their administrative districts into hereditary dominions in the period between about 850 and 1000 AD (see Appendix 1), and both comes and vicecomes were usurped by a handful of men who managed to carve out wholly new dominions on the basis of their private lands and castles in the eleventh century.^[15] Between about 900 and 1075 most of the great men who used the titles dux and marchio continued to use them in random alternation, not only with one another, but with the titles comes (since all marchiones held at least one civitas or pagus in their march) and princeps (a Classical Roman title long used to indicate sovereign authority). Between 1075 and 1125, however, although they survived elsewhere, the titles princeps and marchio were abandoned completely as titles indicative of the lordship of territories dependent on the kingdom of France.^[16] The latter title continued to be used in respect of the lordship of Romance-speaking territories just beyond the borders of the Capetian kingdom throughout the medieval period—in Catalonia, in the Kingdom of Burgundy or Arles, and in Lotharingia—but it was never borne by more than three princes at the same time before 1506.^[17] The title dux and its derivatives continued to be borne simultaneously by no more than five men in France between 1088 and 1360, and usually by no more than two or three.^[18] The titles comes and vicecomes and their derivatives were always much more common, as there were normally more than seventy comitatus, contés, or “counties.” and an even larger number of vicecomitatus, vescontés, or “viscounties,” in the hands of lay barons, and the latter were normally referred to by their territorial title (comes Andgavie or cuens d’Anjou, for example) instead of by their personal name, and almost always employed at least the generic title of their dignity.

It is important to note at this point that none of the four titles in question here is known to have been used to designate a woman before the last decades of the tenth century, and none seems to have acquired a feminine equivalent—either cognate or otherwise—until long after its adoption as a formal title. For the older titles, at least, this is not really surprising, for the Romans neither conferred public offices upon women, nor allowed to the wives or widows of public officials of any rank titles corresponding to those of their husbands, and this prohibition seems to have endured throughout the centuries of Roman rule in the West. Instead, from the second century of the Principate female members of the senatorial nobility had employed feminine versions of the purely honorific predicate-title vir clarissimus that indicated membership within their order, and when under Constantine and his successors such titles were both given a legal standing and divided into a growing hierarchy of grades—vir spectabilis, illustris, magnificentissimus, gloriosissimus—the wives of such dignitaries were given the legal right to assume feminine equivalents.^[19] All women noble by birth or marriage had thus enjoyed at least the basic predicate-title femina clarissima, and the grandest had rejoiced in the title femina illustris et gloriosissima. In addition, from about 320 the wives of men who received the newly-interpreted dignity of patricius or “patrician” were permitted to bear the title patricia,^[20] but the wives of both traditional urban magistrates and the holders of imperial administrationes of all kinds were give no such privilege before the loss of the Western provinces in the fifth century. Not surprisingly, the sub-Roman Kingdom of the Franks that succeeded the Roman régime in Gaul in the fifth century seems at first to have maintained a simplified version of both the administrative and the honorific system of titulature,^[21] but the suppression of the Roman senate at the beginning of the seventh century seems to have led to the abandonment of all but one of the lay predicate-titles—that of illustris, attached to the now gubernatorial offices of comes, dux, and patricius—and it would appear that the feminine equivalent of vir illustris met a similar fate.^[22]

Even before that, however, some attempts had been made to create new feminine titles on the basis of masculine ones still in current use. In the sixth century a feminine version of the generic title senator—senatrix—is attested in a few documents as a term for women of the old senatorial class, but it survived only as long as its masculine equivalent.^[23] More significantly, in the present context, a feminine version of comes—by far the most common title of high office under the Merovingians—is attested in English documents of the same period: the title comitissa.^[24] Not only the existence, but the form of this title is of considerable interest, for the ending -issa attached to the masculine stem was destined to become the normal one for feminine titles of dignity in both Latin and (with modifications) the Romance vernaculars, and it had very rarely been used for such a purpose in Latin before the appearance of comitissa. Of Greek rather than Latin origin, it had long been employed to form the normal feminine of the Greek title basileús (basílissa), and as basileús had become around 620 the official title of the “emperor” in Constantinople,^[25] the attachment of the ending of its feminine equivalent to the stem of comes suggests an assimilation of the lesser to the higher dignity. Because basílissa is not itself attested in any Latin document of this period, however,^[26] it seems unlikely that that Greek word was the direct model for the Latin comitissa. In fact, it is more likely that the latter word was a direct transliteration of the Greek title kométissa, one of a large series of new feminine titles in -issa that were certainly in official use in Constantinople by the tenth century, and may well have been in unofficial use by the sixth.^[27] Since the Byzantine empire long maintained Greek equivalents of the Latin titles of the Constantinian era, often produced (as in the cases of kómes and doúx) by simple transliteration, the usage of the Byzantine nobility could be easily transferred to the Latin West when circumstances made such emulation either possible or socially useful. It is not without significance that by the end of the sixth century the Greek feminine ending had come to be used in Latin to create a feminine version of the monastic title abbas “abbot,” both because abbots and abbatissae or “abbesses”^[28] came from the same élite stratum of society as counts, and enjoyed a roughly comparable social station, and because the status of abbess was the only one before about 1070 that gave a woman an authority that did not derive from that of her husband.

Somewhat surprisingly, at the time of its appearance in England in the sixth century the title comitissa is not attested as a feminine correlative of the official title comes (not in use in England in that period), but as a categorical term for women of the highest stratum of society, whose husbands and fathers were known in contemporary English as gesithas or “companions (of the king)”—the older but obsolescent sense of the Latin title comes.^[29] Comitissa was thus the equivalent in England of the equally obsolescent Roman title femina clarissima or the contemporary Gallo-Roman neologism senatrix. Neither of the two new titles for lay women introduced into Latin before 600 seems to have been in common use, however, and comitissa is not attested even in English documents of the seventh or eighth centuries. Clearly neither the Franks nor the Saxons of the Merovingian period felt that the wife of a royal official ought to be distinguished by a personal title indicative of that status, and it is worth noting that English had no feminine correlative to the vernacular titles ealdorman and eorl (treated as equivalent to comes and dux) until after the Norman Conquest. At that time both comes and its Anglo-Norman equivalent cuens: cunte were introduced as the official equivalents of the Anglo-Danish eorl or earl, and at some time before 1154 (when it is first attested in an English document) the Norman cuntesse (itself only attested about three decades earlier) was adopted for the purpose of designating the wives of earles in Middle English.^[30]

Among the Franks the negative attitude toward titles for wives does not seem to have changed during the reigns of the first three Carolingians—Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis “the Pious.” The new gubernatorial titles vicecomes and marchio/ marchisus informally introduced in this period were employed in very much the same way as the older titles of office, and are not known to have been applied in any form to women. It may be of some significance that a feminine version of the old title dux—ducissa—first appears in three documents of this period (tentatively dated to 772, 787, and 816),^[31] but in each case it was apparently applied to the wife of a Germanic tribal duke, whose status more closely approximated that of a client king than that of a Frankish official, and it may well have been created to translate a Germanic title.^[32] Like that of comitissa, the form of ducissa was clearly based on that of the Greek title basílissa, and the word probably represented either a transliteration of the Byzantine title doukissa or a new formation on the model of the Latin abbatissa, by this time well established. In any case the title ducissa—though destined to be the normal correlative of dux in Latin—is not attested again until 986, and no other title is known to have been used to distinguish the wives of duces until 965. In fact, as long as most of the men who bore the titles in question remained true servants of the Frankish crown, it would appear that their wives had to content themselves with the aristocratic prefix domina or domna.

It was in the troubled years immediately following the partition of the Frankish kingdom among the sons of Louis “the Pious” in 843 that the comites of the western and southern divisions of the kingdom, including those who bore in addition the titles dux and marchio or marchisus, began to throw off their effective dependence upon the Frankish monarchy, and to convert themselves into the hereditary and proprietary lords of their administrative districts. It is surely significant that it was in precisely this period that the wives of certain of these would-be princes, at least, began to be distinguished in contemporary documents by a feminine version of their husband’s title of dignity. In all likelihood these women (like the wives of the dukes of the Bavarians a century earlier) were assimilating themselves to the status of the wives of the kings of the Franks, who had long borne the distinctive title regina, roughly equivalent to the Greek basílissa. It is likely that they also derived some encouragement from the doctrine then being promoted by the leaders of the Frankish church that the partners in a Christian marriage were equal in the eyes of God. In keeping with this idea (closely linked to the new theological conception of marriage as a Christian sacrament which could not ordinarily be dissolved) the status of queen was gradually converted into a functional office or dignitas, and from 856 Frankish queens were normally crowned in an elaborate ceremony very much like that which consecrated their husband’s right to rule.^[33] It would be difficult to believe that the proud daughters of the Frankish Reichsaristocratie who married the territorial governors of the ninth and tenth centuries were wholly uninfluenced by these developments, but it is very difficult to estimate either the absolute or the relative importance of any particular factor.

Since all of the governors involved in the earliest phase of the struggle for independence commonly bore the title comes, and since fewer than a dozen out of the roughly two hundred counts in these regions bore any higher title, it cannot be surprising that the first feminine title to appear in the surviving documents was comitissa. I have nevertheless found only five attestations of this title certainly antedating the year 900, and all five can probably be dated to the second half of the century.^[34] Comitissa first occurs in two undated letters, one probably written to and the other issued by Pope Leo IV, whose pontificate spanned the years 849–855.^[35] The letter written to the Pope was ordered by a Languedocian count named Bera and his wife Romella. The title was next employed by the consort of the Marquis and Count of Toulouse in 865,^[36] and by the consort of the Count of Urgell in the Spanish March in 885.^[37] The title also occurs in a document from Ravenna in Lombardy dated 896.^[38] How common the use of the title had become by the end of the century is difficult to judge, but it may well have remained rare, for I have found evidence of its employment by only three ladies in the first third of the tenth century. Ingelberg, wife of the first self-styled dux of the Aquitanians, styles herself comitissa in three documents (dated 912, 917, and 917/18),^[39] and Adelaide, wife of the prince of upper Burgundy, does likewise in four documents of the period 921–929.^[40] Since all of the women who are known to have called themselves comitissa in the period before 930 lived in the southern part of France, Catalonia, and Lombardy, it may be that the usage was confined to those regions, whose societies were in many respects quite different from those of the northern and eastern parts of the old Frankish kingdom. Needless to say, we have no direct evidence for vernacular usage in this period, but it is likely that those ladies who styled themselves comitissa in their diplomas used a Romance version of the title (probably something very like the later Occitan and Italian contessa) in daily life.

It must be noted at this point that most of the ladies who are known to have called themselves comitissa before the year 1000 were married to men who used the titles dux, marchio/ marchisus, and princeps in addition to the title comes. For some reason, however, none of these ladies is known to have employed a feminine correlative of any of her husband’s grander titles until the end of the second third of the tenth century, and no distinctively feminine form was introduced into the Latin of the charters and chronicles until the last quarter of that century. Why the greatest comitissae refrained for more than a century from adopting such titles, and even then continued in most cases to use a simple comital style for two further centuries, is something of a mystery, but it may be that the wives of lesser counts continued to be content for some time with the purely social title domina, so that between 850 and 965 the feminine comitissa was more distinguished socially than the masculine comes.^[41]

In any case, in the late tenth century certain of the most eminent comitissae seem finally to have decided that the time had come for them to assume a title more clearly indicative of their high rank, and chose to employ a feminine version of one of their husband’s grander titles. Perhaps because the first princesses to adopt such a title were the wives of German tribal duces and spoke a Germanic rather than a Romance dialect, the obvious and historical title ducissa was rejected by most scribes of the tenth and eleventh centuries, at least, in favor either of the title dux itself used with feminine gender (attested in at least seven documents, mostly produced in Germany, between 965 and 1093), or of the Classical word ducatrix, which in Classical Latin had meant “female guide” or “leader.” The latter (or its late variant ductrix) is attested in no fewer than eleven documents produced between 976 and 1076—most of them, again, in Germany, but some in Italy as well.^[42] Between 816 and 1141 the word ducissa itself appears only in one isolated document written in 986,^[43] and as no vernacular forms derived from ducatrix are attested in any language, it is unclear whether a Romance feminine for dux even existed before about the middle of the eleventh century.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first women in the Romance-speaking parts of the old Frankish kingdom to make regular use of feminine forms of either dux or marchio in their Latin diplomas, at least, were Beatrice of Bar, consort of the Duke of Lorraine, and her daughter Mathilda, “the Great Countess” of Tuscany, who had the distinction of being (from 1052 to 1115) one of the first women to rule a territorial principality in her own right. Although the title marchionissa is attested in an isolated Italian document of 967,^[44] it does not appear again in any surviving text antedating the year 1060, when Beatrice styled herself for the first time ducatrix et marchionissa.^[45] Mathilda used a similar style in a number of diplomas issued between 1073 and 1108, and her novel employment of feminine versions of masculine titles to proclaim her own novel dominical status seems to have been imitated by the wives of other princes. Her title marchionissa is also attested in the last third of the eleventh century in three German annals, in which it appears under the years 1071, 1080, 1089, 1092, and 1097.^[46]

After the turn of the twelfth century, the title marchionissa—a word clearly derived from the then-standard marchio—is largely replaced in the surviving French sources by the previously unattested marchisa, a feminine form of then archaic title marchisus. Marchisa is attested in eight documents of the first quarter of the century (two, dated 1116, written in France) while marchionissa is attested only once, in a German source of 1124.^[47] Since the only known vernacular forms of both the masculine and feminine versions of this title in all of the Romance dialects are those derived from the adjectival marchisus rather than the substantive marchio—marchis and marchise in Old French, marques and marquesa in Old Occitan—the prevalence of marchisa in the early twelfth century may indicate that a vernacular version had come into use in some Romance-speaking regions, including France, but this is far from certain. Both Latin versions of the feminine title occur relatively rarely in surviving documents of the twelfth century, and although the masculine vernacular marchis occurs up to a dozen times in most of the chansons de geste currently dated to the first three quarters of the twelfth century,^[48] the feminine marchise is not known to occur in any work written before the last quarter of the century.^[49] As the masculine title marchis had been abandoned by 1125 by all French princes except the Counts of Toulouse (who persisted in styling themselves “marquis” as rulers of their portion of the old principality of Provence), the rarity of the feminine correlative title in France after 1125 was only to be expected, however, and it is difficult to draw any conclusions about its earlier use. The vernacular marchise (or marquise as it was normally spelled from the fifteenth or sixteenth century) was of course the exception to the rule that the feminines of dignitarial titles should end in -issa or some derivative thereof, but it is worth noting that in Latin the older form marchionissa finally prevailed even in France, and remains the normal form even today in all of the countries of Europe except Germany.

By 1100 the Latin title dux was still used by only five French princes—the lords of Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Gothia or Narbonne—but all five now used it with much greater consistency than they had done previously, and all but the lord of Brittany (who still on occasion styled himself comes to 1297) used the ducal title exclusively in connection with the names of the dominions just listed, which had come to bear the fixed dominional title ducatus or “duchy.” The masculine vernacular title dux or ducs is attested 43 times in the Chanson de Roland alone,^[50] and was clearly in widespread use in Old French in the first half of the twelfth century. Despite this, no feminine version of the title in either Latin or the vernacular is known to occur in French sources between 993 and 1152, and this suggests (if it does not actually prove), that despite the custom established in Germany in the late tenth century and in Italy in the late eleventh, the wives of French duces never used an equivalent title before the later decades of the twelfth century. The first French princess known to have used the title ducissa was in fact Alienor of Aquitaine, like Beatrice of Tuscany a ruler on her own right, who on a seal still attached to a document dated 18 May 1152 styled herself Alienor. ducisse Aquitan.^[51] It is possible that she was inspired by the current usage of the Duchesses of Saxony and Bavaria, who had just begun to use the title ducissa (not previously attested in German documents) in the previous decade.^[52] In any case she was followed a decade later by Constance, consort of the Count of Toulouse, Duke of Narbonne, and Marquis of Provence, who on her seal attached to a diploma dated 1163/4 styled herself ducisse Narbone marchise,^[53] and two decades later still by Constance—daughter and heiress of Duke Conan IV of Brittany, Count of Richmond, and wife of Duchess Alienor’s younger son Geoffrei Plantagenet—who in a diploma dated 1181 styled herself ducissa Brit. comitissa Rich.^[54] The vernacular duchesse (or duchoise) is first attested in works of the same general period, including Floire et Blancheflor, dated 1150/75, the Roman de Rou, dated 1174, and the Chevalier au Cygne.^[55] This appears to indicate that by the time of the accession of Philippe “Auguste” in 1180 both ducissa and duchesse, though unknown in France before 1150, were well on their way to being accepted as the normal titles for the wives and heiresses of dukes in France.

The only title whose origins we have not yet considered is the feminine equivalent of the Latin title vicecomes. Perhaps because most vicecomites remained more or less thoroughly subordinated to the comites whose deputies they were until the late tenth century, the feminine vicecomitissa (clearly modelled on comitissa) is not attested anywhere until ca. 1020, roughly half a century after the earliest appearances of feminine versions of dux and marchio. Like the latter, however, vicecomitissa seems to have remained quite unusual before the middle of the following century, as I have found only four examples of its use before 1100: one ca. 1020, one in 1030, one ca. 1066, and one in 1068.^[56] Despite the events of 1066 and the introduction of the masculine title vicecomes as the equivalent of the English “sheriff,” the feminine title is not attested in England before 1125, (when it appears in the unusual sense “female sheriff”^[57]), and is not attested there in the sense of “wife of a dominical viscount” until 1157.^[58] Since the latter referred to a viscountess in France (there being none in England before the fifteenth century), its use strongly suggests that both vicecomitissa and its vernacular derivatives viscontesse, vescontessa and the like were firmly established in France by about 1150, but so far the earliest use of the vernacular derivative viscontesse I have found is in Aucassin et Nicolette, a work of the first half of the following century.^[59]

To summarize, it would appear that the wives and widows of Frankish dignitaries first began to use an equivalent title of dignity in the last third of the ninth century, when their husbands began to assert their independence from the Frankish king and to convert their administrative districts into proprietary dominions, but that the custom may have been confined at first to the wives of the more important dignitaries in southern regions. In any case the evidence suggests that for the next century the only titles in current use were the feminine equivalents of comes—comitissa and its vernacular derivatives—and that feminine equivalents of the higher and much rarer titles dux and marchio/ marchisus were not adopted anywhere until the 960s, while equivalents of the lower title vicecomes did not appear until half a century later still, in the 1020s. The feminine equivalents of the two higher titles may have come into common use in Italy in the last third of the eleventh century, under the influence of the Duchess and Marchioness of Tuscany, but no feminine title of dignity except comitissa—whose vernacular derivative cuntesse first occurs in a surviving document in a version of the Song of Roland possibly composed at the end of the eleventh century—seems to have been current in France until the second half of the following century, when both ducissa and marchisa and their vernacular derivatives appear in French documents for the first time. Vicecomitissa, although attested as early as 1020, does not seem to have been a title in common use in France until the same period, as its vernacular form first appears in documents only in the early thirteenth century.

While it is not difficult to account for the appearance of comitissa in the late ninth century, it is hard to understand why the wives of French duces and marchiones waited a further three centuries before adopting titles suggestive of their full social equality with their husbands. In the end it took women who held the dignities in question in their own right to initiate the use of feminine versions of these titles in both Italy and France, and the wives of other dignitaries did not follow their example until some decades later. It is tempting to see the general adoption of feminine titles of dignity in the second half of the twelfth century as being related in some way to the changes in the prevailing attitude towards noble women promoted in the same period by the poets of northern France. The timing is certainly suggestive, and it may well be that the new ideas about the treatment of ladies being promoted in the courts of northern France encouraged the chastelaines of those courts to assert their dignity in a less equivocal fashion than previously. The adoption of feminine dominical titles in this period must also be seen, however, as part of the general process whereby the nobility of France as a whole was redefined and restructured between about 1180 and 1220 on the basis of the new principles of territorial lordship and knighthood. This complex process saw not only the final stabilization of the use of masculine titles of dignity already alluded to, but the assumption of the prefix dominus and its vernacular equivalents sire, messire, and en by members of the newly noble order of knighthood, the assumption of the feminine equivalents domina, dame, madame, and na by their wives, and the (often simultaneous) adoption of seals and armorial bearings by all members of the greatly expanded nobility, male and female alike.^[60]