Leigh Craig divides her perceptive and lucid analysis of what is known about medieval women pilgrims according to the type of pilgrimage that they participated in. Following a brief introductory chapter and a preliminary survey of the grounds on which medieval writers opposed travel of any sort by women, including participation in pilgrimages, Craig examines the experiences of those who surmounted the obstacles in their way and actually did take part in pilgrimages of four different varieties. She deals first with the accounts of seven women who went on pilgrimages in quest of a miraculous answer to problems (mainly health issues) that they or their loved ones faced. Next she turns to twenty-five accounts, most of them written by men, of women who took part in primarily devotional pilgrimages to distant holy places, such as Jerusalem, Rome or Santiago de Compostella. Female participation in pilgrimages of this type, Craig tells us, aroused greater resistance than pilgrimages in quest of miracles. She then turns to women who went on pilgrimages because they were compelled to do so, either to atone for heresy or in the hope of curing insanity. Women were more likely than men to be required by inquisitors, confessors or family members to undertake these journeys, and since their travels were involuntary their participation was unlikely to encounter serious disapproval. Lastly, Craig deals with what she calls ‘non-corporeal pilgrimages’, that is to say imaginative journeys that did not involve physical travel by the pilgrim. The author distinguishes three different ways in which women might accomplish this. In the first of these one woman defrayed the costs of another person who undertook to make a devotional journey on behalf of the sponsor. In return the sponsor received the spiritual benefits (indulgences and the like) earned on the journey. The second, far less costly, type of vicarious pilgrimage consisted in entrusting someone who was embarking on a pilgrimage to a holy shrine with one or more small portable objects that he or she would lay at the shrine, or perhaps touch to the tomb of a saint or sprinkle with dust from a holy site and then return to their owner at the conclusion of the journey. These objects, in effect, made the pilgrimage on behalf of their owner. The third, and even less expensive, sort of imaginative pilgrimage involved reading and meditating on accounts of other people's pilgrimages to some holy site. One way or another very considerable numbers of medieval women, despite the obstacles placed in their way, evidently managed to make pilgrimages of some sort, either in person or by proxy. Craig estimates that nearly half of the known European pilgrims during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were women.