This paper examines the ways in which women moved through physical and discursive spaces in medieval Fez. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, the built environment of Fez was reshaped as the Marinid dynasty constructed institutions of learning (madrasas) and mosques throughout the city, anchored by the mosques that women had endowed in the ninth century on both sides of the river that ran through Fez. While one chief judge of Fez in the early fourteenth century enforced restrictions on women’s movements in the city streets, by the mid-fifteenth century, women inserted themselves into both the streets and the intellectual world of the jurists, attending study circles and classes on Islamic law at the Qarawiyyin Mosque. This paper explores the shifts in the culture of learning under the Marinid dynasty that opened up a space for elite women to pursue scholarly interests in domains traditionally associated with men. Research on the Islamic world has increasingly moved away from simplistic dichotomies that understand Muslim women as confined to spaces defined by concepts such as private, secluded, and domestic. Categories that reflect modern sensibilities and anxieties often obscure the complex ways in which space was marked and how women negotiated these spaces, and erase the factors beyond gender that determined mobility such as social status, age, and marital status. An examination of sources that document actual legal practice reveals that it was more often husbands who attempted to restrict women’s access to public spaces, and women engaged in private negotiations to challenge these restrictions, or simply ignored the directives. This paper sifts through fragmented references to women’s relationships with space in theoretical and practical legal texts and biographical and autobiographical writings, and reads these texts together to construct a picture of women’s movements through the streets of the city and outside of it, and within the physical and intellectual spaces of its institutions.