The title Ruling Women plays on women as queens and on men ruling women. But in an elegant image, Stacy Klein also evokes ruling as the lines that structure an Anglo-Saxon writer's work on a manuscript page. Using literary queenship as her structure, Klein admits to initial worry over how often textual queens as mediators evoke and foreground broader cultural anxieties that seem to eclipse the queens themselves in many areas of her discussion. Yet she rightly understands that this broadening or matrix of connections vindicates the importance of examining such literary deployments. Privileging Anglo-Saxon contexts, Klein's methodology combines usually oppositional feminist and typological criticisms to discuss five texts. Chapters 2 and 5 are reprints minimally changed from their originals.

In “The Costs of Queenship,” Bede uses his Ecclesiastical History (731) to distance queens from the conversion-by-marriage of non-Christian kings, often associating the closeness of husbands and wives with apostasy as in the case of Raedwald. Pagan kings viewed conversion as a onetime “price” for marrying a woman “peaceweaver” who would give access to the power and wealth that created fame, while Bede's Christian view saw conversion as a continuing process. Bede thus redirects the reader's gaze to the ultimate goal of heavenly reward and depicts true peace as from Christ, bypassing the queens by using them as mediators, mere transitions between two unequal value systems. While others have noted Bede's suppression of positive female agency, Klein thinks his strategy backfires: the omissions contrast with papal emphasis on queenly agency and underscore the power such marriages must have had.

For Cynewulf's Elene, the “extraordinary cultural capital” of Helena/Elene as the “originary Christian queen” (55) allows Klein to concentrate on what cultural work the text might have done for an audience of the late tenth-century Vercelli Book. She reads Elene as a “multivalent historical presence” who encourages the hermeneutic skills needed to read her typologically (70), avoiding the literal reading of the Jews. Cynewulf usually replaces her name with generic cwen (queen) and hlæfdige (lady), highlighting her social status and making her more universally applicable. But Elene is also obedient. Both Bede and Cynewulf “convert” the historical concubine to wife and to queen, respectively, resolving the typological conflict between concubine and queen, while Elene's Christian subservience paradoxically reinforces and renegotiates hierarchies and ideologies.

“Beowulf and the Gendering of Heroism” is perhaps the chapter that most usefully embeds images of queenship in the social matrices they engender. Klein refines Carol Clover's northern European version of the one-sex model as predicated on power (“Regardless of Sex” [Speculum 68, no. 2 (April 1993): 363–87]) by arguing that for Anglo-Saxons sexual difference consisted in military power, to the point where peace was seen as constituted by war. Given her use of other work by Clare Lees, Klein surprisingly overlooks “Men and Beowulf” here (in Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare Lees [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994]). Klein presents Beowulf as embodying a critique of anachronistic, male heroic society in the feminized voices of queens and the aged Hrothgar, who advocates interiorized violence in spiritual battle. The grieving Hildeburh of the Finnsburgh episode becomes the touchstone for seeing the cost of retaliatory violence; the poet lets us see it momentarily through a woman's eyes. That shift of viewpoint anchors Klein's argument that the poet sides with the feminized rulers who posit a new model of masculinity, a stimulating extension of debate.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two lesser-known texts, Kings (992–1002) and Esther (1002–5), by the monk reformer Ælfric. Both translations use the Old Testament for social and political critiques. Klein's detailed work on how Ælfric shapes his depictions of queens is especially helpful in her case for how literary queens “reveal the ideological fissures and cultural stakes” (198). She reiterates at least four times (perhaps better reduced) the changes that might cause anxieties: increased use of titles for queens and queen mothers, of anointing or coronation, of queens as witnesses to royal charters and participants in royal councils, and of queens as the official patrons of female monasteries (13–14, 63, 143, 171). Thus, Jezebel as sole counselor of her husband, Ahab, accrues power for herself, and given that Ælfric's patrons of Kings are two royal counselors to Æthelred the unraed, locating such bad counsel in one woman displaces any insult onto the problems of secret counsel, more likely with a spouse, and idolatry. Yet in Esther, Ælfric minimizes pious Esther's political role despite contemporary increases in queens as charter witnesses. His queen is a national intercessor whose piety could, by encouraging piety in her people, change the course of history—here, the Danish invasions. Klein reads this adaptation as Ælfric's effort to change public expectations of queens but seems reluctant to read antifeminism: Ælfric “attempts to confine Esther to the role of spiritual mediator and to underscore the informal and personal nature of her political power. … [It] is not, I would argue, an attempt to limit the power of royal women qua women. However, precisely what it was is slightly more difficult to say” (173). Honest but overcareful, Klein pairs Ælfric's disillusionment over royal power with reformist portrayals of the royal family as national spiritual guardians. She ignores her own evidence that he chooses to make the woman, not the family, bear the personal responsibility for institutional and ideological failings that limit her efforts.

Klein's engagement with contemporary theory shows how literary and theoretical studies should be turning more to Anglo-Saxon material for the depth it offers: writers within this culture understood how to reshape accounts for political and social effects and took advantage of constructing gendered and political roles in response to specific crises. I particularly appreciated how the choice of texts unpacked any monolithic “Anglo-Saxon” presentation of queens and their figural uses. Individual readings might be fruitfully questioned as any interpretation can be. The usual delays of producing a book aside, Klein's bibliography seems thinner for material after 2000. But her rich readings of detail, impossible to cover in a short review, engage and challenge, showing the stimulating possibilities of this literature. Her book deserves a wide readership and response.