Gender is well established as a tool in the reading and interpretation of texts. Both these books use the concept in this way, with Lynda Coon's texts extending to visual artistic expressions and architectural space, including theoretical space as envisaged in the – unrealised – monastic plan of St Gall. Such reading can enrich and develop our understanding. But as with the application of any interpretative framework, it demands methodological clarity and rigour.

Coon's reading of Carolingian monasticism begins from the Rule of Benedict, viewed in the context of recent work on late antique masculinity, an area of Coon's strength. The result is not entirely novel; but it reveals how far Benedict's rule embodies and transmits the classical/late antique gender system, with its prioritising of the male and masculine, rather than any Christian subversion of this. The gendered content of that Rule is seen as intensified by the Carolingian commentaries of Smaragdus and Hildemar of Civate, but expressed also in monastic art and architecture, through, for instance, Fulda manuscript illumination or the Corvey westwork. Hrabanus Maurus, his work on the cross and his corporeal imagery and exegesis, frames the book.

A gendered approach to Hrabanus’ imagery, or to the Corvey representations of Ulysses confronting Scylla and the Siren, should pay dividends; but whether this book realises them is more questionable. Its method often lacks rigour. The monastic refectory, for example, is read as a place where the ‘masculine’ spiritual word encountered labile ‘feminine’ eating, inducing anxieties which were damped down by the lack of heating; we might legitimately ask why, in that case, the dormitory, the most explicit site of sexual anxiety and temptation in the entire Rule, was heated. ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are used with little contextualised analysis of their Carolingian meanings. Crypts are ‘dark, squat’ (p. 149), as in the Michael Rotonda at Fulda, ‘mucky and chthonic’ (p. 213) and feminine, as opposed to the ‘light, airy’ masculine clerestory; there are worrying hints here of reductionism and biological essentialism. Coon pursues the feminine in this all-male world (female monasticism is not treated). The concept of hegemonic masculinity, and its role in the articulation of hierarchies in such communities, could have been exploited more. Coon's enthusiastic pursuit of vertiginous trails can reveal some stunning scenery, but it called for better route maps. Extended riffs on ‘body men’ and ‘voice men’, on plugged-up mouths and anuses, cannot substitute for clearer exposition and analysis of the texts.

Megan McLaughlin has given us such clarity in her carefully contextualised and detailed study of the reform debate in the later eleventh century. As she demonstrates, the argument concerning key issues of papal and episcopal authority, simony, investiture and episcopal appointment, was saturated in gendered imagery and language, and became more intensely so as the disputes sharpened and deepened. McLaughlin demands that we face such imagery and language squarely: medieval views of correspondences made them, as Tellenbach saw, far more than mere symbols or metaphors. They are not ‘stumbling blocks’ to understanding this political discourse, but a central part of it.

McLaughlin focuses on three key images. First, there is the bride of Christ; applied both to the Church, and to individual churches. Here eleventh-century reformers increasingly cast the bishop as bridegroom to his Church's suffering, abused bride. The second image, motherhood, was both tender and authoritative. Gregory vii used this imagery more than any previous pope to assert metropolitan and papal authority; the Patriarch Michael parried with the gendered familial language of fraternal equality. Finally, there are fathers, and the return of paternal language; especially in the claims for papal authority, though also for bishops, albeit cautiously. McLaughlin recognises here the difference between public forms of address, in letters for example, and the more private world of hagiography; Archbishop Anselm never asserted paternity when addressing King William ii, though Eadmer in the Vita Anselmi claimed fatherhood for him. Such attention to audience might have been sharpened. The Carolingian period, and especially Pseudo-Isidore, emerge as significant sources for the direction that these images were to take in the eleventh century, as on the motherhood of Rome. But real shifts occurred during the eleventh century. McLaughlin demonstrates this through the methods of ‘old-fashioned research’ (p. 14), the laborious and slow examination of large numbers of texts, supported by use of the Patrologia Latina database.

Gregory vii's extremism is underlined. The violence of his imagery and that of those reformers who surrounded him underscores the difficulties for the conservative opposition. Among the latter, the Norman Anonymous met reforming arguments head-on: denying, for instance, the status of bridegroom to the bishop, and, in one version of his introduction, even allotting it to the king; recasting Rome as itself the daughter of the ‘true mother’, Jerusalem. As this indicates, familial imagery is slippery and ambiguous. McLaughlin understands this, arguing, for example, for a turn to paternity as a less problematic source of authority than motherhood. Ambiguities may have been a problem, especially once this language fell into the hands of lawyers; but ambiguity had its uses. Motherhood allowed just that combination of iron hand and velvet glove, of emotional blackmail and legitimate appeal, denied to more legalistic argument. Ambiguities may also measure the rising temperature of debate. The gendered world of kinship, marriage, parent/child relationships – and its sexual underpinnings – are always sources of emotionally-charged imagery; gendered analysis is a way of revealing and charting how this power is tapped. Times of accelerated historical change may intensify both power and ambiguity. McLaughlin contextualises reforming argument in such a period. It should, however, be recognised that some of the findings of recent studies of women, inheritance, marriage and parenting which she cites are still sub judice, not least as a result of the methodologies of close reading and problematising of texts in which she herself engages. The ferocity of later eleventh-century gendered discourse may arise precisely from this context; but conversely the intensification of the dispute may have revealed all the ferocity inherent in the discourse itself.

McLaughlin's conclusion confronts wider questions of public and private, ritual and text. Like Althoff, she sees a public sphere in the subtle and manipulable language of ritual and symbol; she inverts Buc's scepticism about rituals known only through texts – rather the texts themselves are infused and shaped by rituals and symbols rooted in familial/household life. This is a rich book, with all the strengths of a gendered approach that is at once firmly grounded and precisely targeted.