This volume pays homage to Barbara Hanawalt's skill of uncovering the scarcely documented lives of the women and men of medieval England. Her prolific scholarship includes fifteen books, editions, and textbooks, and over fifty articles, and the title of this honorary work alludes to The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York, 1986), read by thousands of undergraduates. The contributions here are a fitting tribute to an inspirational scholar, and they make up a beautiful book and a captivating read.

The chapters sample the varied terrain of medieval England, from religious women to urban politics to peasant lives. In the introduction, the editors explain that the chapters neatly arranged themselves into two halves: social history analyses of groups of people and studies that focus on single subjects approached through creative methodologies (4–5). Other linkages, reflective of Hanawalt's own scholarship, can be found between the contributions of these friends and former students. Throughout, the authors amplify the soft and muted voices of those who did not leave records by reading sources against the grain, examining contexts and networks surrounding the actors, employing the tools of other disciplines, and imagining probable motives and actions through a close reading of the sources.

Jonathan Good begins with a study of London's alien weavers’ community from 1337 to 1381. Through a close reading of city records, Good uncovers the disputes within the weavers’ ranks that were heightened by the labor crisis. His analysis departs from previous scholarship that has concentrated instead on the weavers’ position within the broader community. Looking south and west, in “The Bonds of Trade,” Susan Duxbury considers the relatively understudied inland wine trade radiating out from Southampton. Duxbury, like Good, employs a close reading of this port city's records and combines it with a statistical analysis reminiscent of Hanawalt's work. Duxbury shows that the high volume of wine transported to Winchester and Salisbury was affected by the liturgical season and the events of the Hundred Years’ War. Benjamin McRee threads another strand of Hanawalt's research interests, the intersection of authority and symbolism, in “The Mayor's Body.” McRee argues that mayoral authority in Norwich was limited by the aldermen and commons in electoral procedures. McRee focuses on an intriguing electoral dispute within that urban body politic that raised questions about with whom political authority rested, how citizens conceptualized that authority, and, most interesting, the power of symbolic actions within the electoral process.

In “Even Money That Your Bishop Has Come and Gone” and “Identifying Chaste Widows,” Joel Rosenthal and Susan Steuer focus on episcopal sources. Equipped with his engaging wit and an informative statistical analysis, Joel Rosenthal asks a set of probing questions about diocesan politics that challenge our ideas of episcopal appointments and translations. Rosenthal argues for a “diocesan focus” (76) and reveals that roughly half of all bishops and archbishops filled only one see (“lifers”), and the other half, more than one see (“careerists”). Considering those who don the veil, mantle, and ring, rather than the miter, Steuer examines Yorkshire registers to paint an image of women choosing to become vowesses against the canvas of ecclesiastical politics. Although it is unclear how many vowesses Steuer considered, she describes the ceremony of Benedictio Viduae and, in an interesting discussion, explores the difference between pure and chaste widows.

In one of the strongest contributions, Janet Loengard continues the honor paid to Hanawalt's work on women and turns the reader's attention to the relatively large number of women represented in civil suits between 1242 and 1245. Before property laws developed to the disadvantage of women, Loengard shows that these women were secure in their legal knowledge, especially when it involved their land. As with her scholarship elsewhere, Loengard deftly untangles these cases and brings these legal documents alive. She enables the reader to see these women pursing their interests and defending their claims, sometimes as single women, sometimes as widows, and not infrequently along with their husbands.

Laura Michele Diener marks the shift in the volume from groups of women to individuals by studying Aelred's Rule for what it reveals about his sister. In “The Anonymous Heroine,” she argues that Aelred's sister's anonymity was crucial for her to achieve the purest form of spirituality, as her name alone would tie her to the secular world from which Aelred was trying to free her. In a similarly astute chapter, Linda Mitchel offers two microhistories, of Maud Marshal and Margaret Marshal, which may help us to understand the activities and influence of a broader swath of women. These savvy women worked through kin networks, used inheritance law to their and their heirs’ advantage, navigated court politics, and arranged marriages and wardships. In “Lady Margaret Sarnesfield,” Douglas Biggs likewise considers the strategies of an elite woman who exhibited her knowledge of the courts to litigate in her interest. Although less powerful than the Marshall women, Sarnesfield displayed her political savoir faire during the turbulent early 1440s. Katherine French explores the fascinating life of Margery Kempe, an urban elite, through an innovative approach. French discusses how the Book reveals Kempe's evolving relationship with her parish of St. Margaret's of Lynn. Kempe moves from using her parish to wield social clout to seeing herself as a spiritual leader within that space. French's effective reading taps into a larger discussion of contemporary understandings of the parish and piety, territory that is familiar for her.

In the spirit of Hanawalt's vignettes in Growing Up in Medieval London, Anne Reiber DeWindt and Madonna Hettinger imaginatively fashion stories based on surviving evidence in the last two essays. DeWindt recreates the “social geography” of the Berenger family of Warboys as the Peasants’ Revolt and subsequent rebellions erupted around it. She recreates the avenues through which the Berengers would likely have received news of the events, effectively rewriting the narrative at the local level. In “Unbounded Affection,” Hettinger uses urban sources and monastic accounts, paired with a review of the historiographies of emotion, rural studies, and postplague labor issues, to suggest that affective bonds may have been closer in peasant households than in royal and urban ones. Inspired by an archival find of an early twentieth-century letter, Hettinger imagines a fourteenth-century peasant father's heart-wrenching description of the loss of his son to the plague.

Despite the occasional hiccup in formatting, this volume will be invaluable to scholars new to the field. As Diener so effectively explains when describing Aelred's sister, “we possess only the imprint she made in a male imagination rather than any of her own words” (117). To combat this challenge, many authors effectively model how to read sources creatively and to look at subjects from alternative angles. The contributors also explain jargon and elucidate the idiosyncrasies of the English legal system. For example, Biggs helpfully explains the operation of the Court of Chancery, and Loengard defines terminology such as novel disseisin and chirograph. Other authors point to sources and topics that remain untapped. In nearly all of the contributions, the most recent trends, most notably in women's history and rural history, are on exhibit.

The editing efforts of Mitchell, French, and Biggs must be applauded. The experience of reading the volume is not dissimilar to watching a sunset. One chapter complements the other, as colors do around the sinking sphere; taken apart, the ideas in each chapter are interesting; taken together, the mosaic of scholarship is striking. One key difference is that the legacy of Barbara Hanawalt, as evinced by her colleagues’ work here, is not setting but will endure.