The title is promising – it announces new perspectives on the methodology of research on gender and Christianity in the European Middle Ages. However, does this volume of collected essays – dedicated to the memory of feminist and medievalist Jo Ann McNamara – live up to its title and promise? Lisa Bitel's introduction outlines the tendencies of scholarship on medieval women, from 1900 until the present day; she does it polemically and not always accurately – the idea that medieval women flocked to join religious communities ‘from a skewed sex ratio’ (p. 4) goes back to K. Bücher, Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter (1910), not to Herbert Grundmann's groundbreaking Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. The latter was actually the first to understand the female search for an alternative way of life as an expression of a distinctive spirituality. Equally, I doubt whether Bitel fully takes in the importance of more recent research on the material culture of the female monastic environment. As a consequence, the essays in the book under review rely almost exclusively on texts to which the category ‘gender’, in diverse permutations, is applied. So we meet some familiar texts which are mostly re-examined along the lines of gender and sex. Dyan Elliott turns her attention to Tertullian whom she sees as being at the root of medieval attitudes towards virginity and marriage; she scrutinises how the church Father's perceptions of male and female were linked with angelology (angels not being differentiated into two sexes), and assumes that being freed from sexual activity was a way for women to get rid of the constraints of their bodies. Jacqueline Murray examines how early Christian ideas of body and gender were transformed by medieval writers – male and female – and how monastic environments enabled their inhabitants to blur, transgress or transform gender borders. Ruth Karras examines clerical masculinity, referring to the case of Thomas Aquinas and his struggle for chastity. Monastic writers used military terms to describe their efforts to preserve their virginity, and Karras suggests calling theirs an ‘alternative model of masculinity’ in order to distinguish clerical pursuits from those of secular men. Jane T. Schulenburg, who twenty-five years ago published a foundational account of Strict active enclosure and its effects on the female monastic experience (500–1100), investigates the establishment in nunneries of centres of saints' cults and pilgrimage. She explores ‘some issues of spatial arrangement as related to access, lay traffic, hospitality’ and economic benefits related to the pilgrimage trade (p. 69). Schulenburg relies on hagiographical sources as well as the results of research on the material culture and architecture of early medieval religious houses. Her article allows enlightening insights into the issue of enclosure and its inhabitants' interaction with the secular world. Felice Lifshitz examines the term virgo in its diverse ramifications and shades of meaning in male and female contexts. Are there new perspectives on the overall subject? A lot of the issues addressed in the contributions to this volume remind of work done on virginity, gender, sex and sexuality since the 1970s by medieval scholars such as Jo Ann McNamara and many others. However, occasionally the authors enable their readers to develop unusual perspectives on their objects of study.