This valuable volume is a companion to an earlier volume by Claudio Leonardi and Giovanni Pozzi on Scrittrici mistiche italiane (Genoa 1988). At the heart of it is an anthology of writings by, or written under the inspiration of, women mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some well-known figures, like Hildegard of Bingen, others, like Juette de Huy, who have not received much attention. The selected extracts are translated into Italian, with the original text printed afterwards. Some of the originals are in the vernacular but most are Latin texts. The selection is not only a useful ‘reader’ but the basis for a typology of sources for women's mysticism. The anthology is preceded by essays. Francesco Santi picks out some key themes: the birth of female writing with Hildegard and her idea that God generated a world, ordered but in motion, and that at the centre of this world was man, who could in turn be transformed into God (p. xv). Other themes are the discovery of the body, a focus on the eucharist that attached these charismatic women to the institutional Church via priests (seen not as possessors of a power but as the representation of a renunciation of power, as Santi puts it), and compassion for God. Degl'Innocenti surveys the editorial state of the writings of the authors anthologised, showing how much work needs to be done. Bartolomei Romagnoli contributes an essay on the ‘holy women of the thirteenth century’. It was then, and initially in the Low Countries, that mysticism found literary expression as a self-conscious form of knowledge. There are interesting further suggestions about regional localisation: the north of Europe more influenced by the Cistercians, the Mediterranean by the Mendicants. But the key idea transcending geographical divisions was of unmediated experience of God. Hagiography turns from narrative of lives to description of interior experience, articulated in an unstable set of literary genres. Romagnoli stresses that we are looking at a ‘lay sanctity’. These compressed but suggestive essays are one bookend of the volume. At the other end is an invaluable set of bibliographical notes on the individual authors. This includes erudite comment on the editorial situation and on surviving manuscripts. This volume deserves close attention as a springboard for fresh research.