This chapter surveys how both men and women influenced the gradual recovery of the medieval spirit for cultural consumption. The gendering of Romantic medievalism encodes the ambivalence of troubadourian masculinity from two directions: the first stems from the fact that women began to discuss publicly their interpretation of medievalism particularly in terms of their expectations of courtly love and the chivalric ethos; the second from the viewing of medievalism through the screen of courtly literature which emphasizes the troubadour’s love for a lady, while viewing it through the screen of metrical and prose romances emphasizes knightly endeavour. The first focuses on loss and the unattainable lady, bound up as she is with unattainable property, nature, and desire; this is a system that can only exclude the woman poet. The second focuses on male honour and quest, a value system that pushes women to the background. Grounded either way, she is at the same time supposed to be the locus of the ideal on earth. Temporally (at the same time) she is both present and eternal; spatially (grounded either way) she is both background and centre. Presumably what a real woman wants from this ideological double bind is romantically plausible but realistically impossible: to be the beloved, to be pre-eminent by combining the best of both options in returning the lover’s love (experiencing true love herself) and having that lover protect her chivalrously. But what real women Romantic poets wrote about was not this compliance with the ideological bonds; rather, they attempted to redesign temporal and spatial ground rules in order to break the subject-object dividing line that, in medievalism, keeps them in their place.