Kate Kelsey Staples offers a fresh look at the lives of medieval English women, with a book on daughters, complementing the many existing studies of wives and widows. As she points out, not all women become wives or widows, yet all are daughters; furthermore, “daughter” was a lifelong category, as the link to her father remained after her marriage and his death. Apart from casting a wider net, approaching women as daughters also has the benefit of using a category defined more by biology than patriarchy. The subject of study is not the only convention that Staples defies; she challenges existing scholarship on London women on several points, arguing that a significant number of women in late medieval London were provided—intentionally—with the real estate, money, and goods to be economically active. Although Staples cannot here answer how or even if these women took advantage of their legacies, she provides a strong case that at least some women had more opportunities and were able to exercise more choice than previously thought.

A history of daughters is not the easiest or most flexible approach. Information in any quantity on women as daughters is limited to the records that focus extensively on kin—wills—thus, the subtitle of the book. Daughters of London is based on 3,081 wills enrolled with London’s Hustings Court from 1300 to 1500 (6). These wills yield 1,529 daughters (and 1,854 sons) as recipients of bequests of real estate, money, and movable goods (30). Staples’s primary approach is quantitative, but she supplements her analysis with close readings of a sample of those wills to examine the conditions and stipulations on bequests. This puts a human face to the numbers and provides useful insights into the value and perception of properties and items otherwise aggregated into broad categories. This is crucial in constructing her arguments about the gendering of household items and space.

After providing a concise overview of the historiography of medieval urban women, Staples begins her analysis in chapter 2 with the testators. The categorization of the testators by gender, marital status, and occupation reveals the limitations, both in the language of the wills (e.g., an occupation is not given for half the testators) and in the collection of wills itself, as most testators were men and all had the minimum £10 of property necessary to enroll a will. This chapter is more than context, however, and the categorization reveals several patterns, particularly on restrictions placed on inherited property that required or forbade certain actions on the part of the heir and the greater significance of occupation over gender in shaping bequests to children. Those bequests are the subject of the following two chapters. Staples’s analysis here is admirably thorough, although there are some disappointments; the categories established in chapter 2 are absent from the subsequent analysis, and despite sections in each chapter discussing how the patterns changed over time, the handling of inheritance by daughters over two hundred years is static. Nevertheless, the two chapters provide a comprehensive treatment of the subject, coupled with keen insights into the world of medieval Londoners. In chapter 3, Staples argues that daughters in London received real estate nearly as often as sons (even if they had brothers), providing them with economic options that money and movables could not provide. They also received the same types of real estate as sons, from domestic housing to rents to commercial buildings. Such property often came with encumbrances and other restrictions, but daughters could and did receive hereditary rights. In chapter 4, the wills reveal that daughters received movable property at near parity with sons. Daughters and sons shared the types of property almost equally, including items that might be expected to go predominately to daughters, but gender was important in what was bequeathed, with daughters receiving items to help them supplement income while sons received goods to generate an income.

In the final chapter, Staples turns to the scholarship of women’s history and urban history to provide an overarching interpretation of women in late medieval London. She rejects the idea of English women as economically passive or impotent, even if their activities were subordinated to the household. Drawing on studies of European cities, she instead argues that the women in these wills were more than conduits of wealth who transferred property from one male to another: they actively managed their property and holdings, and not necessarily in low-risk scenarios. At the very end of the book, she finally grapples explicitly with the “golden age for women” debate. While acknowledging the patriarchal structures that surrounded and limited medieval women, Staples chooses to focus on how women found ways to be active within those structures, making the best with the options they had.

Daughters of London is a provocative contribution to the dialogue about the roles, opportunities, and experiences of women in late medieval England and will channel the debate in new directions, even though many scholars will disagree with her interpretations. Reflected throughout the work, Staples’s challenge to the traditional interpretive paradigm that places men in the active, public sphere of the city and women in the passive, private sphere of the household is particularly intriguing as it is rooted firmly in an analysis of movable goods. Although conceived as a contribution to the study of late medieval women, there is abundant material for those interested in other aspects of urban and economic history, in England and elsewhere. Staples offers tantalizing if brief comparisons to women in other English and European towns, as well as to rural English women. Moreover, her observation that every woman is a daughter has its corollaries: every daughter has parents, and a study of daughters includes comparisons with sons, implicitly or explicitly. Altogether, this is a valuable study with relevance to many fields, and it will help shape the ongoing debates by raising new questions and redirecting old ones.