In Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, Susan E. James draws from 1,200 wills from repositories across England to breathe life into women's experiences throughout the late medieval and early modern period. In an effort to extend the scholarship of Amy Erickson and Barbara Harris, James advocates for the will as an untapped record. James reveals women, across status, class, and geographical boundaries, as active in expressing their concerns over their property and community, exercising their authority over their heirs, and contributing their wealth to the economy. To support her central argument, James relies on two pillars: one, that these concerns reached down the social hierarchy; and two, that women often used different rhetoric and relied on different resources than did men in their wills. While James succeeds in painting these women's lives vividly with details from their wills, she is less effective at supporting her argument with the same evidence.

In six chapters, James approaches late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century women's lives from a variety of angles: remembrance, identity, work, land, money, and material possessions. Remaining true to providing a collective voice to a subset of the population usually silenced by coverture laws and “male-dominated processes” (96), her chapter subtitles such as “In My Mother's Shop” (112) and “My Bed Fellow as My Sole and Onlye Executor” (171) are taken from the wills themselves. James's approach is to present examples drawn from wills across region, class, and time to show how women provided for those in their communities (chapter 1), to explain the ways that women ensured their memory would endure (chapter 2), to outline the range of occupations pursued by women and their vocational training (chapter 3), and to highlight the ways in which women's experience of bequeathing property was circumscribed by the cultural practice of marriage (chapter 4).

This methodology allows us to envision women like the two maidens who attended a wedding dressed in white with red petticoats (274) noted in a 1555 will; to hear Agnes Smythe's frustration in 1562 over her daughters’ squabbles when she threatened to withhold her bequests to one daughter if she persisted in troubling the other (192); to feel Agnes Grosewell's charitable spirit behind her gift to “her” leper in 1488 (48); and to sense Isabel Huchinsonn's perhaps reluctant monetary endowment to her dead husband's “bastard wench” in 1569 (180). In chapter 4, she breaks from this approach to explore in depth three cases of women and their husbands (two from the mercantile elite and one from the gentry) in order to support her idea that women managed property and were trusted to do so. By placing these women's wills in context with their husbands’ wills, she is able to support this claim, although she is less effective at proving that these three women were representative.

James's strongest contributions to scholarship lie in her fifth and sixth chapters, in which she explores credit and material culture. It is in these chapters (and elsewhere when she discusses objects) where she rolls up her sleeves and pulls the wills into their constituent parts. For example, she discusses the ways in which testators would repurpose dresses for church vestments as a memorial that the congregation would recognize (74). Elsewhere, she experiments with the uneven balance between the preponderance of items of sartorial display in elite women's wills and items of household display in merchant women's wills (266). It is in these chapters that the reader is given pause to reconsider the role women played in an economy based on credit, as the wills she dissects show that women used their plate to secure credit (215), lent money with interest, kept ledgers of their transactions (210), and used goods not only to express themselves but to influence those around them. Women and men together loaned, borrowed, and pawned material goods, with all of their attendant symbolism and value, and we should consider the import of their actions in the credit-driven economy of the sixteenth century.

James writes evocatively about how wills are “encoded with memory” (90) and how “each will was a ledger of a life” (36), “an archive of emotions” (282). She expresses how we can read these wills to reveal women as the “doorkeepers to the corridors of power” (147). She has a gift for translating pre-modern women's experiences for a twenty-first-century audience. Less convincing in this work is Jones's claims for a gendered difference in will making as, more often than not, she does not examine men's wills or other scholars’ research on the subject.

Attendant to this concern, the work also suffers from a poor methodology to prove chronological change across the century. Jones often uses the language of enumeration without quantifying her data set, for example: “formulaic bequests [for funeral feasts] were found at all levels of society before the Reformation and were retained more often by women than by men thereafter” (31); “a significant percentage of women cling to their family of origin as their prime identifier” (68); “Wills also show that when a woman was the head of the household … [they] more frequently than men left servants as their principal legatees” (124). With a qualitative methodology designed to “engage with women in the first person, in their own words,” (13) it is much more difficult to prove how the Reformation reshaped ideas of memory; in what ways the experience of the testator and legatee was gendered; and to what extent we can effectively talk about women across the social scale, urban and rural, as a “population group” with a shared culture. Also problematic is that in her effort to connect with the women in her wills, James does not stop to define terms central to her analysis, including the “poor” and “ordinary” women (chapters 1 and passim), patriarchy (44) and “female gendering” (135), and “medieval traditionalism” (59). Although some may be disappointed at overlooked opportunities for analysis, others will connect with the idea of thinking of wills as “word portraits of women” (67).