The relation between women and intellectualism in the Middle Ages has long been ignored or occluded, save for relatively recent concentration on ‘token’ women writers who seemingly broke the mould of female non-intellectualism: Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and Christine de Pizan, for example. Even the well-read and resolutely spiritual Margery Kempe did not quite cut it in terms of inclusion within the closed shops of female learning and mysticism as far as twentieth-century scholarship was concerned. The late 1980s, the 1990s and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, have seen a generative sea-change to this type of wanting epistemology, led in part by a succession of edited collections and monographs devoted to women who are certainly classifiable as both leaders and intellectuals. Boydell and Brewer's expanding list in this area of study, within which Women intellectuals and leaders in the Middle Ages comfortably rests, is, indeed, a great testimony to our growing understanding of the breadth of intellectual acumen and the type of leadership it enabled amongst women of diverse backgrounds, experiences and educational achievement during the medieval period, as well as to the number of scholars now working in this area.

The contributors to this volume build upon progress within this field in recent years by drawing upon diverse manuscript and other archival sources to argue that women were able to attain far greater levels of learning and leadership than have hitherto been envisaged – and, moreover, that learning was clearly not restricted to the religious or spiritual but extended also to the legal, the medical and the social. Additionally, this collection challenges other less-interrogated precepts: first, that female intellectualism could only be achieved through the medium of Latin; second, that non-Latinate intellectualism achieved via the vernacular or material culture was somehow inferior to that of Latinity; and third, that women's ‘lack of learning’ somehow rendered them either less or more ‘authentic’ than their more formally educated peers in the eyes of modern scholarship. Such a tripartite interrogation therefore renders this collection both important and compelling.

This is a weighty volume. Containing twenty-three contributions, including its introduction and epilogue, it is divided up into six parts, each headed up with a preface and focusing on overlooked areas or hitherto problematic assumptions regarding women's intellectual engagement and leadership within their lived-in cultures and environments (both synchronic and diachronic). Parts i and ii focus on the embeddedness of Jewish and Muslim women within cultures of the law and poetry, and the intellectual life of the professional woman writer, respectively. Meanwhile, part iii brings into view a series of studies on the ‘lost’ woman author and new perspectives on some of those we thought we did know. Part iv offers new interdisciplinary approaches to the old conundrum regarding the interplay of gender, patronage and power, while part v focuses on the Latinate ministries of women within the Church. Finally, part vi aims to bring women intellectuals and leaders ‘out of the shadows’, but specifically laywomen who often took on the type of communal leadership so overlooked within earlier, less gender-aware and less informatively intersectional scholarship.

The strengths of this collection are, therefore, many, not the least because of the weight of research experience accumulated by many of its contributors who have long been offering powerful and, frequently, game-changing interventions in the field. These are punctuated, too, by the contributions of newer scholars also making important interventions within our understanding of medieval women's intellectual cultures. The new research offerings this combination of scholars provide are therefore inflected by many combined years of discovery and argumentation that, in turn, feed into the importance of this volume. A particularly noteworthy case in point is the contribution by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, whose essay arguing for the composite identity (or identities) of the twelfth-century ‘writer’, Marie de France (including an appendix written by Ian Short) will surely alter the way we read this ‘woman’ and her work from now on. Other essays cover a wide European and temporal range, from the early Middle Ages (for example, Sarah Foot on Bede's abbesses and Gary Macy on recent scholarship's approach to ordination amongst women in the early period) to, on occasion, post-medieval female literary inheritance (for example, Gemma Simmons's essay on the Yorkshire religious intellectual, Mary Ward). Such a combination of the old and the new, the well-trodden and the untrodden gives this book an additional charge in terms of its importance to contemporary scholarship.

Inevitably in any ambitious volume such as this, a few areas of contention and/ or omission sometimes assert themselves, however. Some of the cited scholarship on women's literary cultures appearing in the volume's introduction could be a little more up-to-date, for example, and I found the lack of a collated bibliography (or any bibliography) disappointing. I am also not so sure that this volume specifically ‘makes a start at showing why women community leaders, professionals, and intellectuals of the medieval world spoke so vitally to their own day – and to ours’ (p. 18, my emphasis). The latter is an important claim, but one that has indeed been previously addressed by feminist scholarship – and now by more intersectional approaches – for a number of decades, although such a conviction has only recently begun to attain more widespread approval, of course – and then sometimes only grudgingly. Instead, what this volume does is, rather than actually pioneer, it brings together under one cover and aegis so much of the brilliant and brave (but often disparately distributed) scholarship on medieval women's learning and leadership undertaken to date, developing and interrogating it in order to push it forward for both a tried-and-tested and wholly new, audience. To this end, I can, perhaps, leave Barbara Newman with the last word, taken from the end of her own contribution on the two Helfta Mechthilds, whose own inter- and intra-actions for Newman offer a paradigm for medieval women's construction of a ‘great web of literary exchange’ such as that hitherto restricted only to ‘the books of their brothers’ (p. 395). This book's greatest achievement is that it also does just that: it provides us with a range of exciting new perspectives on the complex ‘web’ of medieval women's intellectual achievements as well as their synchronic and diachronic legacies.