Kim Phillips's book is partly a study of female youth and partly a study of the construction of femininity in late medieval England, with maidenhood being seen as an important ideal of femininity. These two themes necessitate an approach informed both by social history and cultural history, and the result is a book that is as much a product of gender history and the history of sexuality as it is of women's history. Phillips has a lively, readable style, even when dealing with complex theoretical concepts and debates. This is therefore a book that could be profitably assigned to students, although in its approach and arguments there is much for experts in the field to take note of too.

Phillips adopts the medieval term “maiden,” rather than use a modern one such as “female adolescent,” because it retains the twin meaning of “girl” and “virgin,” the latter alluding to the ideal behind the category. This ideal is explored primarily in the first two chapters, which set up a deliberate tension, which runs throughout the book, between maidenhood as an age of intense socialization in preferred forms of femininity and maidenhood as itself an ideal of womanhood. Chapter 1 examines the distinctive attributes of this phase between childhood and adulthood, such as its bodily and mental qualities, the entry and exit points of the phase as set out in different discourses, and argues that maidenhood—with its combination of sexual maturity and virginity—was often represented as the “perfect age” of woman's life. Chapter 2 begins a consideration of how girls were prepared for the next phase of their lives, marriage and motherhood. Phillips coins the phrase “active docility” to explain how maidens “were taught not to be completely passive, nor to be dominant, but to acquiesce in being subordinate while still playing important roles, in the family, religious life, and in economic contributions” (13). This chapter focuses on questions of literacy and on conduct literature, but, with its emphasis on socialization, it should be read in conjunction with the following one on “Work.” Chapter 3 is about the training of young women, too, in the sense that education in this period, as Phillips argues, must be considered more broadly.

It is in the third chapter that Phillips challenges what she sees as the orthodoxy of female youth as a period of unusual autonomy for women. She argues that modern scholars have been too quick to view medieval maidens’ economic participation through the lens of modern feminism's notion of work as a form of liberation. Her take on the evidence that has been presented by other historians is that “it is difficult to see how such harsh working conditions could have in general held a high degree of economic and emotional independence for young women” (131). This discussion also takes Phillips into the debate about medieval women's work more generally and whether its status improved significantly after the Black Death or not. Although here, as Phillips herself cautions, findings are drawn from small samples of printed records, it is intriguing, for example, that she discerns that women, including daughters, were actually less likely to take up landholdings or manage them independently after the plague than before.

The overall tone of the remaining chapters is more upbeat. In chapter 4, on “Sexualities,” not only does Phillips consider what is prescribed as licit behavior for young women, she also thinks about the opportunities for pushing against such boundaries through flirtation and literary fantasy. Here she is thinking primarily of noble maidens, and the argument runs counter to the orthodoxy that premarital sexual activity was of most concern in the highest status groups, which had a strong concern for lineage. In the final chapter, “Voices,” the particular concern is to allow some maidens “to speak” in the form of a number of brief case studies, although with some of the lower-status maidens Phillips has to content herself with interpreting their actions rather than their words. A particular theme is the role of maidens in shaping or challenging prescribed femininity.

In the overall conclusion, Phillips argues that medieval maidens, as a group or as individuals, were neither “autonomy-seeking young women, resisting socialisation in gender” nor entirely “chaste, quiet, obedient, docile yet useful maidens.” However, she does conclude that there was more of a “desire for security” than a “longing for liberation” (203). This security seems to be imagined as largely economic and to have come in the form of marriage. As a result the picture Phillips presents looks more positive for noble maidens. However, one wonders if this view also partly stems from reacting against the very different historiographical arguments about noble maidens and lower-status girls. While there is much logic to Phillips's thesis, this economic determinism is perhaps in tension with the aims of her chapter 5, for example, where individual maidens are shown to have made their own choices based according to their own priorities. Is it right to think that emotional independence and harsh working conditions are mutually exclusive? This book offers a thought-provoking read, both for students and scholars in the field.