Barr's judicious study addresses the complex practice of pastoral care, as discussed in sermons and manuals for parish priests, to assess how well clerics understood, and catered for, the needs of their female parishioners. Pastoral care, and particularly the hearing of confessions, is described as involving the creation of a carefully-crafted web of religious obligations, spiritual needs and social considerations. In this context the duty of pastoral care to women could admit ‘a potentially venomous spider’, as a result of the strong association of women with sexuality, and their dependent status. Recognition of such risks may have left such pastoral duties inadequately performed. Barr's careful analysis of the texts goes a long way towards discarding this interpretation, although she would not want her readers to jettison it completely. Close textual analysis of the various versions of Mirk's Festial sermons shows some, but not all, transcriptions introducing explicit salutations to men and women. Most significantly, even those which do not follow the general pattern in salutations do include deliberate reference to male and female parishioners in passages dealing with pastoral care. Barr is acutely aware that the impact of gendered and generic language may be culturally specific, but she is surely correct to point to the significance of these selections as indicators of the clerical understandings of their pastoral role. The analysis of sermon exempla that follows is important for her argument of potentially Janus-faced attitudes. Exempla show the close association of women with sexual sin, thus propagating the idea of female sexual danger. However, equally important is Barr's observation that the biographical contexts of these women have little in common with the everyday lives of parishioners. For men, the ‘fit’ is closer, even if not quite as close as Barr suggests, largely neglecting those engaged in crafts and agriculture. Given that many of these exempla had been repeated for centuries this is perhaps unsurprising. That Barr cites one interesting example in which the sick person at the centre of the tale is male in some texts and female in others also serves as a reminder of the conventional adherence to traditional anecdotes. This is not, of course, to say that such stories have no resonance, but they may work principally as dramatic parables of sin and retribution. Moreover, as Barr acknowledges, particularly in her discussion of the marital debt, they can carry nuanced understandings of gendered culpability. In joining these strands together, it is Barr's analysis of the instructions to priests and confessors that is most illuminating. Her work provides a welcome reminder that for grave sins, such as adultery, priests were enjoined to assign penances to married women that would not draw attention to, and force disclosure of, their sin to their husbands. Clerics may have been encouraged to see women as inherently sexual creatures, but the penance of the married woman was prized for its individual sincerity and safeguarded against her husband's wrath. The shining-faced truly contrite prostitutes of the exempla offer a similar re-evaluation of contrition versus social opprobrium. Most interestingly, Barr shows how these pastoral texts elaborated on the maid, wife and widow triad to produce more nuanced categorisations of the needs of types of women. Oddly, in this process the category of ‘widow’ appears to have been lost. Barr convincingly shows that the ‘singlewoman’ category is assumed to comprise the young and those who lack the economic autonomy to be asked whether they have paid their dues. Dutiful priests encountered complex, if incomplete, ‘gendered lessons’, and, despite the threat of sexual slander in caring for their female parishioners, were concerned to minister to ‘each christian man and woman’.