The Antwerp Dialogue follows The Hull Dialogue (2013) and The Kansas City Dialogue (2015) as the last in the editors’ three-volume series on nuns’ literacies in Europe from the seventh through the late sixteenth century. The three volumes contain fifty-three essays in total, with contributions by forty-nine European and North American scholars. The introduction to this third volume provides a concise overview of the entire project. The editors’ purpose is not to present a grand theory or universalizing synthesis but to put in dialogue a range of specific case studies reflecting the complex variations in religious women's literacy across time, region, religious orders, and communities. A particular strength of the volumes is their exploration of the relationship between Latin and vernacular literacy. The swathe of languages covered reaches from Irish, Icelandic, Spanish and Catalan through Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian to Swedish, Danish, Czech and Hungarian.

Approximately two-thirds of the series’ contributions concentrate on the period from the late 1300s to the early 1500s. The principal geographic focal points are England, the Low Countries and Germany. With respect to religious communities, multiple essays feature convents and nuns associated with the Observant Reforms or the Birgittine Order. Scholars whose research interests align with these foci will find the volumes especially rewarding, but the editors succeed in providing broad temporal and geographic coverage of medieval religious women as readers, copyists, authors, and translators of texts; as interpreters of images; and as participants in the distribution and exchange of books.