While gender has become a key dimension in medieval and early modern history, we still know little about gender relations at the court of Maximilian I beside his dynastic politics. Previous research has often concentrated on his personality and neglected the interactions between the many male and female actors who participated in establishing his rule. This project systematically scrutinizes the gendered dimensions of Maximilian’s court between 1493 and 1519. (1) It puts the emperor’s dynastic politics into a wider geo-political context by comparing the courts and political agency of Maximilian’s wives, Mary of Burgundy, Bianca Maria Sforza, his daughter Margaret, his granddaughter Mary, and Mary’s sister-in-law Anna to allow for a cross-generational assessment: How did seemingly “individual” qualities and actions of men and women relate to gender roles and cultural traditions? (2) It integrates the gender dimension into the overall prosopography-based claim of the SFB ManMax to take personal networks as fundamental for pre-modern rule: Women played roles in provision and supply, intellectual and religious education, social and political patronage, pious foundations and charitable activities. By investigating the social networks of court ladies, female servants and employees, we pursue the interrelations between social ascent, office, and the politics of kinship and gender. (3) It focuses on the gendered dimensions of the intellectual community at and around Maximilian’s court. Its networks of kin included mothers, sisters, wives and daughters alongside male peer circles. What does the newly discovered source material reveal about their impact on their male relatives’ careers, in trans-regional intellectual networks around 1500, and in the wake of the Reformation?