In this book based on her dissertation, Valerie Garver sets out to demonstrate that “women, specifically elite women, were active participants in shaping and perpetuating the behaviors, beliefs, and practices that marked the culture of the Carolingian lands between ca. 700 and ca. 925” (1). Her goal therein is to challenge the observations of Suzanne Fonay Wemple (Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981]) and others that the status of Carolingian women slipped considerably from the milestones achieved by aristocratic women during the reign of the Merovingian dynasty (4). By approaching lay and religious women side-by-side, and integrating not only prescriptive and descriptive evidence but also textiles, archaeological remains, and literary sources, she suggests it is possible to reveal rich detail about aristocratic women's everyday lives. Garver sees many signs in the extant Carolingian source material that the contributions of elite women—as wives, mothers, nuns, and heads of households—were valued and praised by their male contemporaries. They also possessed sufficient agency to influence power dynamics, advance social and economic relations with peers, and perpetuate family memory effectively.

In approaching this monumental task, Garver divides her study into thematic chapters of beauty, family, prudence, wealth, and textile work. These broad categories have the advantage of allowing her to move freely among a variety of evidence in disparate parts of the Carolingian territories. The strength of this book is Garver's encyclopedic mastery of a broad array of Latin sources that shed light on poorly documented aspects of women's lives in the early Middle Ages. She also integrates textiles into her discussion and thereby provides insight into the female hands that wove or decorated them. Her study thus offers a wealth of examples highlighting women's continuing role in public and private spheres, their daily activities like sewing and the instruction of children, their responsibility in modeling virtuous behavior, and the challenges they faced in the course of their lifecycle. At times, however, the sheer number of cases illustrated by Garver overwhelms her argument; the book would have benefited from stricter editing and excision of some of the superfluous examples and narrative redundancies. Garver's writing is most compelling when she delves more deeply into discrete topics. Particularly interesting reading were her careful analyses of the memorializing strategies of the Unruoching family under Eberhard of Friuli and his wife Gisela (94–98) and the connections between religious and secular gifts of silks and other luxury fabrics in the Carolingian world (239–46).

The book's greatest disappointment is that Garver does not return to the tantalizing premise she poses at the book's opening. Rather than refuting directly the historiographical tradition that has asserted for the past two and half decades that women's roles declined in the Carolingian period, Garver restricts herself to documenting positive perceptions of elite women and their contributions in the Carolingian period. Her narrative would have benefitted significantly from a more precise discussion of how the Carolingian period differed from those that preceded it. Attention to the late antique and early medieval antecedents of the Carolingian world is sparing, and she only touches on prominent authors who wrote on such matters alternately to suggest continuity (for example, 26, 35, 234, 238) or change (for example, 53, 126). Garver also blurs the discussion of Carolingian developments by relying on Merovingian examples on subjects for which there was presumably insufficient evidence (for example, 59, 179, 252). This dependence was particularly noticeable since the illustrations therein invoked invariably pertained to Merovingian material culture in her otherwise superficial integration of archaeological studies in the book.

Another way in which Garver might have confronted the challenge of answering the question she offers up at the book's opening would have been to interrogate in greater depth the limitations posed by the texts from which she drew her source material (11). Given Garver's optimism about women's continued agency in the Carolingian period and the concurrent and dramatic growth of manuscript production, I was left wondering why there was still such a dearth of information regarding women's roles in the ninth century. Although I waited to see more suggestions as to how, in comparison to earlier eras, we might weigh evidence (or a lack thereof) of women's attributes and contributions collected so assiduously by Garver, the question was left largely unanswered.