My first reaction when I opened this book was ’I have not held a work of scholarship of this nature in my hands for some time’ and I do not believe that was derivative wholly of my own reading over the past few years (in fact I am quite certain it is not). Let me make some opening comments on the quantitative nature of this work – and I confess that I have always found quantitative history compelling as an approach. The book has a twenty-seven-page bibliography containing around 675 sources all of which are cited in the text. Furthermore, somewhere between 30 per cent and 35 per cent of the printed material on the pages are footnotes, all of which are citations and none of which are discursive commentary -- this figure is likely closer to the higher end of my estimate considering the fact that they are in a smaller font size. (Genuine footnotes: no flipping pages to the end of the binding -- thank you OUP editors and Sykes … publishing this work with the wretched practice of endnotes would have absolutely destroyed the experience of reading it.) Suffice it to say that Sykes is in absolute command of the entirety of the source literature primary and secondary, and that she firmly bolts absolutely every assertion, comment and interpretation she makes down with clear and fairly compelling evidence (this is often completely compelling evidence).

The title of the book accurately summarises Sykes’s project of delineating how the emerging monastic communities of both sexes (and in the early period under her discussion these communities were often mixed) restocked their populations through employing the language of physical reproduction (mothering and fathering), and how this language evolved and substantively changed over several hundred years. Quoting from her introduction:

So she adopts as read the Robertsonian position on medieval textual analysis -- quite rightly.

Her discussion covers the subject from the seventh century through circa 1100 (her delineation). Her focus is broadly on the concept of mothering, but this necessitates a comprehensive discussion of the contemporary understanding of fathering. She draws her evidence from textual analysis, burial practice, coinage (some of the most interesting and esoteric evidence) and genealogy – both spiritual lineage and physical lineage. Her vision is beyond comprehensive. An early conclusion, in her first chapter, ‘The reproduction of mothering’, which discusses the seventh and eight centuries states:

The next chapter, ‘The traffic in women: gender, value, and exchange, 600–800’, expands this discussion and produces the evidence from burial practice and coinage.

Sykes’s third chapter, ‘The mirror stage: reforming royal and monastic households, c.800–c.1100’, is focused on textual analysis (much of this based on Alfred’s work as the previous two focused on Bede) – her fourth and final chapter is exegetical as well. Here, in chapter iii, she begins a deliciously elegant application of Lecan’s theory of the ego to the exegesis of the texts in a way which is entirely unforced, and this continues in the final section. Lecan is used to help understand the texts on their own grounds and is not paridigmatically imposed upon texts written over a thousand years before his system was conceived. To execute this successfully required a very steady and dexterous hand (and to my immense surprise I found it entirely successful; my own conceit is to mistrust Lecan and his system strongly).

The fourth chapter, ‘Speculum of the other woman: embroidering maternal genealogies, c. 950-110’ discusses treating holy women as what I will term ‘spiritual commodities’. Commodities both physical and intellectual, because the chapter tracks the translation of the physical bodies of several abbesses/saints to new locations in new shrines and the textual history surrounding their hagiographies; she writes:

She has three case studies each clearly demonstrated. The practice also brings to my mind the translation of St Frideswide from the Midlands to Oxford by the monks at Oxford because she was more famous and the resulting pilgrimages would provide a source of revenue for the house. I had not realised that this practice was common (if not widespread): so the women become both a spiritual commodity for devotion and a physical source of income for the new location.

The conclusion to the book is best given in Sykes’s own words: