The experience of women in both the marriage market and in the labor market has long been of interest to historians of the Middle Ages. Despite the paucity of source materials, as compared to either those that document the lives of contemporary men or of women of later periods, historians have long appreciated the importance of deciphering the range of opportunities available to late medieval women if they are to understand the demographic and economic developments that preceded the massive dislocations of the Black Death and the larger period of crisis for which it has become the enduring symbol. Yet despite the focus that has been trained on patterns of marriage and women's work, almost no effort has been forthcoming until now to study the role played by women in the capital markets of the late Middle Ages. This important study by Barbara Hanawalt goes a long way to rectifying that lacuna, at least for London, arguably one of the most important capital markets from the high Middle Ages onward.

Hanawalt's study has important implications for a number of areas of historical debate. Most immediately, her work speaks to a critical debate in historical demography: the question of whether the labor shortages of the post-Plague era lead to an increasing average age at first marriage for women, higher rates of permanent celibacy, and lower rates of widow remarriage. Such a thesis has been well articulated in recent years, especially by scholars associated with the Cambridge Group for Population Studies. (See in particular P. J. Goldberg. Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.) For them, the hypothesized post-Plague rise in the marriage age of women is the critical piece linking the early-marriage regime long believed to characterize the Middle Ages to the distinctly different late-marriage pattern that the Cambridge Group has posited as the regulator of the early modern English demographic regime. However, in the absence of much direct evidence about actual marriage ages, the resulting debate has been an inconclusive one. To the extent that Hanawalt's new book sheds further light on the legal and financial practices associated with marriage, for London single women and widows her contribution is substantial.

Her work also speaks to the growing literature on the commercialization of England in the Middle Ages and the concomitant move to shift the origins of precocious English economic development further back in time, even before the early modern period, which was itself a push back from the classic history of the “take-off” of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As scholars of modern economic development increasingly seek the origins of the phenomena that they study in the medieval past, it becomes ever more important for medievalists to develop a clear picture of the legal, social, and commercial institutions that set the parameters of medieval economic activity. Again, Hanawalt's book has much to offer the economic historian along these lines.

Hanawalt forcefully and convincingly asserts that women played a critical role in the circulation and consolidation of financial assets in late medieval London; and that they did so specifically on account of the somewhat unusual right of London women to inherit wealth in their own names, either as daughters (often in anticipation of marriage) or as widows. In addition to their secure rights to the return of their dower, they also were entitled to a share of the joint estate built up during the duration of a marriage. This portion could be further supplemented by additional resources under a widow's control either in her role as executor for her dead husband's estate or as guardian of the assets of their minor children. Moreover, the “liquidity of capital and women's access to it” (p. 7) was critical to the relatively fluid social structure of late medieval London. The free transfer of wealth via daughters and wives prevented the establishment of long-lived family lineages with the concentration of property in the line of oldest sons. And while Hanawalt does not particularly emphasize this possibility, it does seem likely that the fluidity of London's social structure contributed to its economic dynamism as capital would have had a much greater opportunity to find its way to its most productive use under circumstances not beholden to the strictures of an exclusively patrilineal system.

Given the important contributions Hanawalt's new work makes to several debates of great historical significance, I feel no hesitation in recommending it to economic historians, even those who do not normally read widely in social and/or family history, the genres where this book fits most comfortably. My only lingering frustration, and it is one against the sources rather than Hanawalt's use of them, is that despite the incredibly careful archival work in evidence here, it is still impossible to answer the critical question of how representative her conclusions are. Extant data do not allow her to even guess at what share of London women were in possession of capital assets, or what proportion of all marriages ended in the transfer of wealth via a woman. That the women who found their way into the court records that Hanawalt exploits so successfully were indeed carriers of significant capital assets is not in doubt. But how typical they were of all London women remains an unanswered question. If it is the origins of economic development we want to explain, knowing more about the underlying population behind her cases would be a most welcome (if perhaps impossible) addition.