Jane Cartwright has revised and enlarged her studies of feminine spirituality in Wales made over the past decade, adding a long chapter on Marian devotion, and assembled them into a learned and useful book. Given the limitations of the surviving sources, her focus is inevitably on hagiography – both stories of Welsh saints and Welsh translations of tales of universal saints – but she employs as well courtly poetry, a wide range of visual evidence and documentary material on the three known Welsh religious houses for women. Her account shows exemplary avoidance of claims to a ‘Welsh character’ or Welsh exceptionalism – claims which, she argues, could be based only in European-wide comparisons – but thoughtfully explores the ways in which some Welsh texts (for example, the Welsh Life of Katherine of Alexandria) depart significantly from other accounts. Especially interesting are her arguments that a number of Welsh saints' Lives were crafted for a lay audience, in particular the pious family, and that Welsh attitudes toward women showed a preference for religious devotion within marriage rather than for the cloister. This interpretation helps to explain the very small number of nunneries in Wales, although there may also be causes for this in Welsh property and inheritance law. And the extreme rarity of nuns in medieval Wales no doubt, as Cartwright suggests, provides context for the fact that the only extant poetry concerning nuns is in the courtly genre that advocates their seduction, although neither misogyny nor voyeurism can be discounted as causes. One of Cartwright's most suggestive observations is the prominence of maternal saints in Welsh hagiography – a prominence that seems anomalous when placed in a European-wide context. Although stories of universal saints (such as Katherine and Margaret) who were martyred defending their virginity were translated and circulated widely, saints such as Martha of Bethany, or even the Magdalen with her jar of ointment, were valued for their housewifely talents. And the most popular indigenous Welsh female saint was the mother of St David, Non, one of the few raped saints in the medieval canon. The words of Welsh women themselves have not survived, so we can never know the answer to our query; but we must at least ask what the effects would have been of a paradoxical religious message that seems, by valuing both chastity and maternity, to have given an almost religious value to women's acceptance of violation.