In his 1934 presidential address to the Jewish Historical Society of England, Michael Adler began by highlighting the unrivaled position that Jewish women held in the economic life of the pre-expulsion Anglo-Jewry community. Adler drew particular attention to one Jewish woman who amassed a vast personal fortune and became the matriarch of an extensive family business enterprise: “among all these women capitalists of England, none approaches the eminence of Licoricia of Winchester” (“The Jewish Woman in Medieval England,” in The Jews of Medieval England, ed. Michael Adler [London, 1939], 17–42, at 38). Although Adler and other historians have since sketched some of the details of her life, Licoricia has yet been subject to a wide-ranging study. We should be grateful, therefore, that in this posthumous publication, edited by Patricia Skinner, who worked on the final manuscript, Suzanne Bartlet (d. 2008) sheds considerable light on Licoricia's life and that of her family, placing both against a background survey of the Jewish community at Winchester. Following Licoricia's business dealings and legal proceedings over the course of the thirteenth century, Bartlet demonstrates effectively how Licoricia flourished and prospered in the English credit market but also how her situation, like that of the Jewish community as a whole, increasingly deteriorated.

Arranging her study chronologically, for the first four chapters Bartlet introduces us to Licoricia's background and early business connections, her first and second marriages—the latter to the equally wealthy David of Oxford in 1242 and, finally, her life as a widow after his death in 1244. Bartlet is clear about the limitations of the surviving evidence; for instance, nothing is known about whether Licoricia had siblings, and only a few clues shine light upon the identity of her father and first husband. However, Bartlet is able to draw out much from the material that does exist. Neither are all of these initial chapters wholly concerned with Licoricia. In chapter 2, drawing upon research undertaken for an earlier article (in Jewish Culture and History 3 [2000]: 31–54), Bartlet discusses two other prominent Jewish businesswomen of Winchester Jewry, Chera and Belia. From chapter 5, although Licoricia remains in the picture, we also follow her family's efforts to survive the Barons' War of 1266/7 (chap. 6) and their attempts to recover debts lost or destroyed during the war (chap. 8). Disaster follows in the next decade; Licoricia is murdered in 1277, and her family is subsequently caught up in the coin-clipping pogrom under Edward I (chap. 9). Leaving Licoricia's family behind, chapter 10 concludes with a short summary of the conditions Jews faced in the 1280s and the events leading up to their expulsion in 1290.

Throughout this study, Bartlet demonstrates considerable knowledge of the period in which her subjects are located; all the same, the chronological approach has its drawbacks. In the past few decades, scholars have examined the parallels to be found in the lives of medieval Jewish and Christian women, including attitudes to pregnancy, the opportunities for education, and the status of widows. Bartlet rarely comments on how Licoricia's narrative fits into these wider academic debates. Nevertheless, Bartlet does demonstrate the possible relationships, beyond financial ones, that Jews might have had with their Christian neighbors. Furthermore, in her discussion of Licoricia's daily life and possible routine, we hear a little about the food, clothes, and pastimes of England's medieval Jewish community. It is perhaps a pity that here, unlike some of her earlier works, there is little room for debating or confronting previous interpretations. For example, in “Women in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community,” Bartlet’s contribution to Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives (ed. P. Skinner [Woodbridge, 2003], 113–28), she had argued that her own research could be used to challenge the prevailing view that Jewish families had only one or two children. An exception, however, is found in Bartlet's fascinating discussion of Licoricia's son Benedict (chap. 7). Bartlet believed, in contrast to earlier scholars such as Adler and Cecil Roth, that Licoricia's son Benedict and the guildsman “Benedict of Winchester” were one person, not two; it is Skinner, however, in an editorial note ( Jews in Medieval Britain, 84 n. 1), who is left to clarify Bartlet's opinion on this matter.

Having said this, Bartlet effectively uses a wide range of source material in her study; she not only utilizes the Plea Rolls of the Jewish Exchequer but also uses evidence from court cases, deeds, bonds, charters, various rolls, and occasionally contemporary histories. At times the evidence only allows for a partial restoration of her subject's character and motivations, yet her hope is that “with patient reconstruction … something of the personal lives of individual Jews can be revealed” (10). Certainly, Bartlet manages to provide a “thick description” of Licoricia's life by setting the woman's behavior and her social interactions within its broader cultural setting. If there is a fault with this study, it is one that the editor readily admits in the preface, which is Bartlet's casual attitude toward referencing. This is particularly apparent in the last few chapters and might be frustrating for those wishing to retread similar ground. That said, for those new to the kind of legal and financial sources utilized in this study, Bartlet writes clearly and with a distinct lack of jargon. Finally, one might be forgiven in assuming, based on the title and the publisher's abstract, that this work is in part an investigation of Licoricia's murder—or that, indeed, it looks in depth at topics such as marriage and motherhood. Nevertheless, any explanation of the political and economic vicissitudes of thirteenth-century England is left incomplete without reference to the important part played by the Jewish community. Bartlet's investigation into Licoricia's life acts as a valuable microcosm of this changing landscape.