As Chaucer's Wife of Bath would say, there is nothing like experience of the world. The ten articles that make up this slim volume aim to show that, as far as the unique experience of medieval pilgrimage is concerned, women were exposed to it just as much as men. Their focus is loosely on Galician women on pilgrimage to Jerusalem or within Galicia itself and on foreign women on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. All these different women had in common the misfortune of being living religious symbols in a patriarchal and pious world, simultaneously Eve and Mary, the source of sin and the source of salvation, and therefore at once deserving of chastisement, veneration and protection. This religious view of women may well have informed female pilgrimage in the Middle Ages (discussed here by M. I. Pérez de Toledo, M. González Vázquez and M. Cendón Fernández), but reading this book one learns less about how women experienced pilgrimage than about the anxiety of fathers, husbands and clergymen at having their precious brides of Christ exposed to the dangers and temptations of the wider world. Their fears are expressed in a multitude of writings of a cautionary nature, full of cunning, unfaithful wives, wanton daughters and enterprising Lotharios waiting by the roadside. Real women – the innkeepers, butchers, bakers and silk-workers depicted in the illuminations of Alfonso x's Cantigas de Santa Maria (M. V. Chico Picaza) – are too often mere shadows, their individuality dissolved into tenacious female stereotypes, which can be attributed, no doubt, to the scarcity of eloquent non-literary records. This (or careless editing) is made glaringly obvious by the fact that the well-documented pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela of Birgitta of Sweden and Isabel of Aragon, queen of Portugal, are described no less than three times (M. González Vázquez, J. A. Sottomayor Pizarro, D. Péricard-Méa and Päivi Salmesvuori). Or by C. A. González-Paz's article on Guncina González, which is more about the circumstances of her life and family than about Guncina herself, who expressed a wish to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem but may or may not have realised it. It is regrettable, moreover, that important questions regarding the transformation of popular devotion over a period of four centuries, the social rank of female pilgrims, the recreational and liberating side of pilgrimages (so perceptively deplored by Christine de Pisan: see p. 108) and the setting up of local romarías de donas are treated very much in passing (M. González Vázquez, D. Péricard-Méa and I. de Riquer) or not treated at all. A more thoughtful consideration of these issues and a less pronounced tendency to accumulate evidence that is then left to speak for itself would have made this a far more engaging and novel book, and a more suitable reflection of its authors' vast knowledge of a fascinating subject.