This volume consists of thirteen essays and a substantial afterword by scholars from Australia, Europe and the United States, including an introductory chapter by the editors. Organised in a loosely chronological order, the first two essays, by Elsanne Gilomen-Schenkel and Susan Marti respectively, explore evidence of cross-gender collaboration in double monasteries, by definition the most likely site for such relationships, noting both the remarkably high number of such institutions as well as their steady decline over time. The remaining essays offer local case studies of an institutionalised male presence in female monastic or semi-monastic communities which entailed direct contact with women. The female ‘partners in spirit’ of these provosts, priests, lay brothers, provincials, provisors and canons belonged to Frauenstifte (canoness houses for the nobility, discussed in detail by Eva Schlotheuber and Sabine Klapp), the Beguine movement (the focus of essays by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Wybren Scheepsma), and Benedictine, Premonstratensian, Cistercian and mendicant orders. Rather than examining devotional literature to find evidence of a partnership model, most of the primary sources under analysis are strictly administrative documents such as charters, necrologies, business-related correspondence and legal and economic records and registers. The thought-provoking afterword by John W. Coakley, Sara S. Poor's essay on the Sister Catherine Treatise and its propagation of women's potential as spiritual teachers, a chapter on the productive relationship between Guibert of Gembloux and Hildegard of Bingen authored by Fiona J. Griffiths, and Wybren Scheepsma's examination of religious texts that might have been penned by the Dominican visionary Hendrik van Leuven loop back to the spiritual dimensions of gendered relations in the cura monialiumi, all pointing to the differences between church injunctions restraining cross-gender interactions and evidence of the ways in which men and women circumvented these very injunctions.

The thesis driving these valuable and intriguing local case studies, spanning such an ample range of sites and epochs, is that despite normative ecclesiastical pronouncements and conciliar decrees that advanced strict enclosure for medieval religious women, clerical celibacy and a theological declaration of the essential female inferiority to male, daily life on the ground necessitated interactions and generated opportunities for negotiation rather than uniform female deference and a top-down exercise of male authority. The relationships between religious men and women as evidenced in administrative sources proved to be more nuanced and complex even if religious orders such as the Premonstratensians (studied by Shelley Amiste Wolbrink) were commonly known to reject interactions of any kind with women. Why did religious women appear to have been able to counter-balance ecclesiastical and theological misogyny on the level of mundane quotidian transactions with male members of their orders or secular clergy? Taken as a whole, the case studies suggest a few distinct causes for partnership configurations, which, for the most part, were embedded in extra-ecclesiastical customary practices, values and conditions. These included the high social status of an abbess or a canoness and the powerful social and familial networks that she could therefore employ, and which might trump the ecclesiastical authority of a provost, canon or priest, especially if he were of a lower social rank. In urban settings, communities of religious women and/or their female leaders could play a city council against a religious order or the ruling bishop, especially if they had family members on the city council who looked after their best interests. Strong social networks allowed families to support their female religious relatives from either outside or within monastic walls, as was the case with Thomas, cantor of Villers, and his sibling Alice, a nun of Parc-les-Dames (a case study discussed by Anthony Ray). Finally, on an individual level, the sheer force of personality and charisma of religious women could attract and retain male devotees and thus seems to have encouraged relationships of mutual support, as did women's ability to garner the respect of their male administrative supervisors. Equally conducive was the humanity and common sense of individual religious and non-religious men who did not allow themselves to be blinded by misogynist stereotypes, as demonstrated in the kindness and generosity of men like Guibert of Gembloux and Hendrik van Leuven.

None the less, the frequency of contacts, oftentimes benevolent and constructive, between religious women and men, to which legal and economic documents attest and which seem, at first glance, to contradict the ecclesiastical demand for a strict separation of genders in monastic domains, does not per se imply a partnership of equals, as numerous contributors remind us. Sigrid Hirbodian's essay explores the extent to which religious women in mendicant orders in Strasbourg were able to choose their spiritual advisers, and what factors reigned in the wishes that they expressed, even in the face of improper sexual behaviour on the part of their confessors and pastors.

In the administrative domain, the frequency of contact between religious men and women imitated medieval secular family life in that gendered obligations for men to interact with and support women in legal and economic matters were based on the legal principle of gender tutelage, the Mundium or munt gewalt. Customary tutelage stipulated the need for male guardianship of women, and was the responsibility of either a husband, a woman's father, or a designated adult family member such as a brother or uncle. In the realm of monastic and semi-monastic institutions, male and female religious became an alternative kind of ‘family’, not only assuming, figuratively, the designation of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, but also legally and economically assuming the responsibilities that male family members were expected to exercise on behalf of their female kin. Given that medieval labour was gender-specific, lay brothers, who lived in women's religious houses and whose existence is well-documented in necrologies and business documents, were as needed for heavy labour and the other gender-specific occupations required to maintain a large household as were their counterparts in an extended secular household.

This robust collection of essays, many of which were expertly translated into English by Julie Hotchin, re-opens the question of the long-term impact of the theological and ecclesiastical privileging of masculinity or, as John W. Coakley aptly names it, the tension between ordinary life and the gendered imagination.