In Authority, Gender and Space in the Anglo-Norman World, 900–1200, Katherine Weikert uses a multidisciplinary approach to present a reassessment of (and offer an alternative to) many standard interpretations of the relationship between gender, space, society, and authority in the Central Middle Ages in England and Normandy. In doing so, she challenges the reader to rethink some common assumptions that often go unquestioned: for example, that the Norman Conquest of 1066 provoked a radical change not only in the elite population of England but also in the ways in which that population lived; that the literary tropes delineating a hard border between public and private life and between the activities and statuses of men and women played out faithfully in the “real” world; or that it is possible to demonstrate that material objects had clear gender associations, such as the connection of textiles to women and metal objects to men. Weikert explodes all of these common assumptions by the simple expedient—although not so simple in terms of methodologies and interpretations—of actually looking at the archaeological record of elite spaces; actually collating the data found in Anglo-Saxon-era wills as to the distribution of material objects, land, and money; and actually comparing these forms of data with the literary record found in texts as varied as Beowulf, the Adelae Comitissae of Baudri, and four presentations of the story of King Eadwig, his dalliance with two women on the day of his coronation, and the reaction of future saint Dunstan. This might seem a rather disparate collection of sources, and, admittedly, it is. There is, however, both a clear trajectory and a rationale behind the choices made by Weikert, and these hold up under scrutiny.

Weikert uses the bulk of the book to explicate and illustrate a methodology called “access analysis” in order to assess the ways in which medieval buildings were utilized by people of various social classes. I had never encountered this particular form of analysis and found it initially confusing. After a couple of illustrations of the system, however, I found the graphing of access in these medieval structures and the places they occupied to be fascinating and compelling. A component of this analysis has to do with demonstrating who had access to which spaces and how that access changed over time as the buildings themselves evolved over the centuries. (Weikert differentiates carefully between “space” and “place,” and I am trying to honor her definitions here.) Although the structures analyzed all could be identified as elite buildings—manor houses, castles, and so on—Weikert shows that a wide variety of people and social groups gained access to many of the spaces and locations, and that the interaction of elite and nonelite people was likely quite common. In addition, directly countering often-repeated claims that the more remote the space the more gendered it became (the lady in the tower motif), Weikert reveals that gender is perhaps one of the least important categories identifying both access and control over spaces. As she states, status trumped gender most of the time.

This relegation of gender to secondary-category-status also appears in the ways in which people before the Norman Conquest made wills and their strategies for making bequests. Weikert discovered that, when one looks not only at the testator but also at the recipient, the identification of soft goods with women becomes far less assured. Women might have dominated as bequeathers of textiles, but the people to whom they bequeathed such items were both male and female, and those who received soft goods clearly were expected to pass them on to the next generation of heirs and inheritors. Similarly, the transmission of most other material objects and of land did not depend on gendered categories but instead on the specific concerns of the individual writing the will, a conclusion that Weikert admits is “rather poststructural” (186) but reprioritizes the individual and dismisses the kind of group-think presumptions of earlier scholars.

Authority, Gender and Space is not a perfect book, but, then again, no book is. It is highly technical and as a result can be a bit tedious to read, especially the very long chapter on access analysis of medieval buildings. The comparison of English and Norman structures could be viewed as problematic because the buildings assessed do not share a common timeframe. English wills from the pre-Conquest period have no Norman or post-Conquest parallels, so it is impossible to determine whether the nuncupative system used by the Normans and Anglo-Normans was equally ungendered in its bequests. The main connection among the literary texts discussed in the final chapter seems to have been specifically the kinds of words and descriptions of rooms, places, and spaces utilized by their authors, but there was little else to connect them. It was difficult for me to contemplate a comparison of the descriptions of Heorot and the chamber to which Wealhtheow and Hrothgar retire in Beowulf and Baudri's description of the luxurious bedchamber of Countess Adela of Blois. Nevertheless, what Weikert does in this chapter is reinforce the lack of connection between gender and authority that she found in the access analysis and the wills. She does so, however, in a more subversive way by challenging the relevance of literary depictions of male figures such as Hrothgar and Eadwig as becoming feminized by their abandonment of male “public” spaces in order to cavort with the women in their more “private” bowers. Adela's husband does not appear in Baudri's work, but it can be assumed that this “daughter of the Conqueror” (as she is famously identified) had already symbolically emasculated her husband by the splendor of her surroundings and their worldly luxury, which implied that Adela held the reins of authority in Blois.

In short, this is a very important book that could radically alter the ways in which historians, especially, view the medieval social landscape. It is worth reading and definitely worth spending time digesting and processing.