The last two or three decades have witnessed great advances in both women's and gender history, as scholars like Judith Bennett, Pauline Stafford, John Parsons, and Jeremy Goldberg have opened our eyes to the lives and conjectured experiences of medieval women in England. Louise Wilkinson contributes a county study of women of thirteenth-century England, a century curiously neglected by modern historians. We have here “the first regional survey of women in thirteenth-century England. It combines a detailed local study of women in Lincolnshire with reflections on much wider issues relating to gender and female identity” (1). Heeding Pauline Stafford's counsel against treating medieval women as a single and cohesive group, Wilkinson explores the interaction of gender with social status and the female life cycle through chapter-length studies of Lincolnshire women from different walks of life. Her work also addresses the central questions of whether women acted alongside men as equal partners, particularly within the family, and whether they were constrained or empowered by contemporary religious and biological ideas about gender difference.

Wilkinson's highly readable study is divided into six chapters and includes three appendices and a range of genealogical charts, maps, and tables. In a detailed introduction, the author outlines her intentions for her work and the historiographical context in which she writes but also addresses the contemporary theoretical structures governing the lives of English women in the central Middle Ages. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century gender ideologies, often conflicting and contradictory, were founded on a dynamic mix of biological and medical thought on sexual difference, church teachings on sexual inequality and female fallibility (intensified by the movement for church reform in the second half of the eleventh century), and a host of other discourses including shifting and ambivalent models of the Virgin Mary. Developments in church doctrine in this period articulated a more positive role in society for women—ideals of mutual consent in marriage and loving partnership between husband and wife—but these too were underpinned by notions of female subordination. Theories of female fallibility found expression in inheritance practices and common law.

In each of the first four chapters of Women, we are guided through a series of largely independent, although complementary, studies of women of the principal social strata in thirteenth-century England: the aristocracy, the gentry, urban society, and the peasantry. The striking first chapter explores the activities of three thirteenth-century noblewomen and asks whether these women could be “more than mere adjuncts to their fathers, husbands and sons” (13). Wilkinson provides detailed accounts of the lives of Nicholaa de la Haye, Hawise de Quency, and the latter's daughter Margaret de Lacy. Few counties produced women as well documented as these three, and few women were as noteworthy as Nicholaa de la Hay, the twice-widowed heiress who became castellan of Lincoln Castle and cosheriff of Lincolnshire and whose career is mentioned by a number of contemporary literary sources, including the chronicle of Richard of Devizes and the History of William the Marshal. The exploitation of landed wealth, social standing, and family/household roles at different periods in their life cycles facilitated the (not necessarily linear) progression of these three women from little more than pawns in the hands of ambitious male dynasts to important figures in Lincolnshire and English society during widowhood. Political climate and accidents of fate sometimes also provided elite women with opportunities for political influence.

More difficult to assess were the gentlewomen of thirteenth-century England, for whom there is neither the evidence for detailed career studies nor the sorts of records (manorial court rolls, guild registers) that enabled statistical evaluation of urban and peasant women. The task also demands sensitivity to the development of knighthood in early thirteenth-century England. Although Wilkinson's evidence is sometimes thin, her examination of the female relatives of the fifty-eight administrative knights involved in the Lincolnshire eyre of 1218–19 reveals a picture similar to that of the elite women, despite more modest socioeconomic circumstances. In the broadest sense, urban and peasant women had a similar experience of womanhood to that of noble- and gentlewomen: once more young women functioned first and foremost as conduits of property, connection, and sometimes socioeconomic advancement between men of like standing. Wives were, again, typically governed by their husbands, and widows enjoyed a greater level of independence.

Yet, crucial differences among these groups arose from a combination of, inter alia, socioeconomic circumstance and the influence of customary law and regional variation, particularly in inheritance practice. Although generally in a less privileged position than male counterparts, the married townswoman seemed to have plied her trade, often in brewing or the service industry, independently of her husband. Thus, she had greater economic freedom than did noble and knightly wives. Similarly, single young peasant women could be found at manor courts and entering tenements, and villein women sometimes secured admission to their late fathers’ holdings while still unmarried and had access to cash savings. However, Lincoln borough custom prevented urban widows from recovering dower in lands alienated by late husbands, in contrast to women of the higher social strata. Prostitution in urban society, and contemporary attitudes toward prostitutes, reinforced the marginalization of women at the poorest levels of Lincolnshire urban society.

Chapter 5, “Criminal Women,” examines documented felonies in nineteen of Lincoln's thirty-one wapentakes (hundreds). Considerable disadvantages for female appellants were enshrined in Glanvill, Bracton, and the Magna Carta: a woman could only bring an appeal for injury to her person in the case of rape or the death of her husband, provided she had witnessed his death (or her husband had died in her arms, according to Bracton). Yet, the Lincolnshire evidence supports the findings that, in practice, women often brought appeals for crimes beyond theoretical guidelines. On Lincolnshire's women religious, Wilkinson explores women's place in the “foundation, spiritual function, recruitment, internal life, organisation and discipline of the county's nunneries and double houses” (167).

One of the most striking themes in Women reveals the interplay of personalities and the practical relationship between men and women in all sectors of society that could undermine gender stereotypes and lessen the woman's subordination. This is a particular strength of the work. Societal expectations in thirteenth-century Lincolnshire were shaped by contemporary gender ideologies—women did not serve in central or local government, the law courts, or church office—but restrictive gender discourses were often tempered by personal circumstance, life-cycle phase, the political climate, personal acumen, and a host of other practical considerations. At all levels of Lincolnshire society, women's legal subordination within marriage seems to have been mitigated by a working partnership between husband and wife in the running of family and estates. Particularly in the upper echelons, partnerships provided women with a means to power and influence outside formal public office.

Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire is an accessible and valuable addition to the growing corpus of studies on medieval Englishwomen. Indeed, this wide-ranging volume cries out for similar, comparative works on other counties of thirteenth-century England; I wonder whether a series ought to be founded on Wilkinson's model.