The essays in this volume, in the words of its editors, explore “the nuances of what constitutes female spiritual authority, how it was acquired and manifested by religious women, and how it changed and evolved from the High Middle Ages to the early modern period” (1). The collection rightfully embraces a broad array of those who might be termed religious women, including vowed nuns, anchorites, beguines, and even orphaned Venetian girls trained as sacred choristers. But the collection's great strength lies in the breadth of its definition not only of the religious life, but of religious authority and the ways in which it might be expressed, including explorations of theological writing, book production, manuscript illumination, visionary claims, institutional management and leadership, and political service and negotiation. Considering its breadth, the thematic links in the volume are compelling, particularly in that they remain stable across significant chronological and geographic settings. From the twelfth century to the very threshold of the eighteenth century, and from Hungary to France and Sweden to the Italian peninsula, we find women negotiating for both social and spiritual leverage in a variety of ways which are underpinned by a common pragmatism. How, these essays ask, might religious women interact with the social context in which they found themselves in ways that lent them authority?

Several of the essays are notable for fresh insights gained through novel approaches to the visionary women (and their writings) which have been the subject of fruitful attention for the last two decades and more. Editor Imke de Gier's contribution is an acutely perceptive read of Marguerete Porete's The Mirror to Simple Souls which seeks out the nature of Porete's religious authority. De Gier's analysis emphasizes Porete's theological confidence as she eschewed apologetics or official approval in favor of a more intrinsic authority derived from her own knowledge and experience. Kathleen Smith's analysis of linguistic patterns in Julian of Norwich's Showings draws our attention to the author's shifting use of language, as she moves from logical and philosophical investigation to a poetic, “incantatory writing” (171) whenever she seeks resolutions for intractable problems of faith. Julian's theological authority, claims Smith, is vernacular, feminist, and poetic, an almost musical response in moments of intellectual distress and doubt. The authority inherent in visionary claims also receives innovative attention from María Eugenia Góngora's essay, which explores the shaping of the cult of St. Ursula by the visions of Elisabeth von Schönau, and in Piroska Nagy's discussion of charisma, the body, community, and female religious authority in the vita of Lukardis von Oberweimar.

However, more structural and institutional forms of women's religious authority are addressed here as well. In this, the volume is notable for its exploration of the collective authority of women's religious communities. Sylvie Duval's essay places the spread of the Dominican Observant reform in Italian women's communities of the fifteenth century in its social context, arguing that social utility—and the support of women religious themselves—were a determining factor in the adoption of the notion of strict enclosure. Mathilde von Dijk's discussion of the Sisterbook of Diepenveen explores the authority of specific female leaders within communities of canonesses, and Victória Hedvig Deák discusses the appropriation, by St. Margareta of Hungary, of Dominican spirituality as a kind of moral authority. Ping-Yuan Wang's essay on the seventeenth-century letters between the Visitandine communities of Brussels discusses their casting of entire communities, rather than individuals, as a locus of authority. But perhaps the most acute analysis of religious women's interaction with and assumption of institutional authority is Anneke Mulder-Bakker's discussion of Jeanne de Valois as an example of “the soft face of power” (162), the influence that prominent abbesses might exert as political negotiators, hostesses, and mediators. Mulder-Bakker's nuanced discussion of this power is deft, well-supported, and provides a valuable analytic frame for future work.

Not all of the methodologies here are textually oriented, however. Two essays provide analyses of women's religious authority as it is expressed in the imagery of illuminated manuscripts. Andrea Worm's exacting, context-rich work on manuscript illumination images of abbesses in the Ottonian Empire traces the way that visual representation changed as notions of religious authority shifted from residing in individual leaders to residing in whole communities. Eva Lindqvist Sandgren's essay offers a description of the history of manuscript production and illumination in the Bridgettine houses, and though she does not emphasize the connection to questions of religious authority as strongly, she examines with care the modes by which specific nun-scribes and nun-owners left their marks in marginalia and text. These art historical essays are well supported by six full-page color plates in the front matter, and a generous number of black and white plates in the essays themselves.

While the volume reaches toward the early modern, all but two of the essays (those by Wang on the Visitandines, and Caroline Giron-Panel on Venetian choristers) center on sources predating the Reformations. As such, this volume will be of most value to those with an interest in medieval religious life, or in the medieval context which continued to have effect on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious women. Together, however, the twelve case studies provide a valuable survey of the interplay between religious women's authority and the variable complexities of their social settings and networks.