To say that these three excellent books—two monographs and a collection of conference papers—hold few surprises is to indicate how far various versions of women's history and gender studies have come in recent years. Such work is now so mature, so well linked to interdisciplinary inquiries, and so comfortably within the mainstream of historical inquiry that the scholarship under review here, offered by experienced and well-published scholars, mostly serves to extend our views, provide us with valuable data, and reaffirm the consensus that has been built about agency, avenues of power and independence, and the valiant (if often unsuccessful) resistance to patriarchy. Actually, strategies and accommodations, rather than a battle of the sexes, is a better summation of what they, collectively, tell us about how women and men interacted in late medieval England.

In a narrow sense the books share but limited common ground. They pursue different topics, or different aspects of the larger topic of the role, status, power, and contributions of women to this world. They build their arguments on different bodies of data—a generalization that mostly holds even for the papers in the Erler and Kowaleski collection (and I bypass an interesting article by Holly S. Hurlburt on “Public Exposure? Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe: The Example of the Entrance on the Dogaresse of Venice” as beyond the orbit of this journal). And yet, in many ways, the books compliment each other, giving us incisive, suggestive, and sometimes speculative variations on the larger theme. They help us take stock of where we are, just as they point to directions for future research and lines of inquiry. But despite their diversity, I will present the work of Erler and that edited by Erler and Kowaleski as centering to a considerable extent around a common enterprise or activity—that of women as readers, owners, transmitters, and intellectual and spiritual consumers of books—and then I turn to Harris's synthetic study.

Mary Erler's Women, Reading, and Piety extends the kind of work she has been presenting for some years.Footnote ¹ Though Erler arrived on the historians’ scene with credentials in literature, she has had no trouble building bridges to the adjacent realms of social history and of popular religion and spirituality, usually writing with a strong emphasis on the women of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Her work rests on and reveals her deep knowledge of the world of manuscripts and early printed books, as it does an intimate acquaintance with the lives of pious women—some vowed and encloistered, others still engaged in the give-and-take of daily life.

Women, Reading, and Piety is, in a sense, a two-way street. It traces networks of women by way of books they owned, shared, transmitted, gave as gifts, loaned and borrowed, and discussed with each other (and with sympathetic men). At the same time, it traces the networks of books by way of networks of women—some bonded by ties of blood or marriage (and spiritual kinship), some by region, some by the harmony of ideas and beliefs, some by shared life experiences (vowesses, in the cloister, widows in the world, etc.). That these themes overlap, as did the networks and pathways of life, and that they were neither mutually exclusive nor delineated by sharp boundaries is a compliment to Erler's presentation as she leads us through complexities of social interaction into realms left open for choice, individual inclination, and traditions of family and local cultural circles.

The variations in this rich tale are presented through case studies, each shaped to explicate “a female culture of reading” (p. 5). A basic premise, expanded in the introductory chapter, is that the wall between the world and the cloister was not only permeable, as far as women and/or their books were concerned, but that the vector from the former into the latter could be as common, and as influential in terms of setting the agenda of private spirituality, as that in the other direction. To set the table, we begin with a survey of what is now known about nuns’ books and reading: numbers, variety (including but going well beyond liturgical texts), routes of movement, gifts, libraries, exchanges between individuals and houses, and the like. The numbers roll in. Whatever the shortcomings of regular and pious women in the last century of English monasticism, unlearned and illiterate were not charges that could be leveled against them.

Erler presents four complicated case studies, four weavings on the loom. Each study begins with a central figure and then expands from a center point outward to cover the movement of books, reading, and ideas to and from others who comprise her network: the London vowess, Margery de Nerford, and her library; Margaret Purdens, a Norwich widow and her “devout society”; the Fettyplace sisters at Syon Abbey, for orthodoxy; and, finally, for heterodoxy, Anchoress Katherine Manne and Abbess Elizabeth Throckmorton (coming after the Henrician assault). Networks of blood, friendship, and spiritual leadership and instruction are explicated as Erler tracks the books of her heroines and their world. Women's reading and women's books offer a wide window into an obscure and dimly lit world.

Women, Reading, and Piety works in good part because its thesis—no longer under attack or even seriously questioned by those with an interest in this direction—is supported here by a wide swathe of bibliophilic devotion and awesome detective work. Erler's background in manuscripts and book history stands to her advantage, and her look at specific volumes, inscriptions, and dedications, and some well-chosen illuminations and woodcuts remind us that the forest is made up of trees. Appendixes that extend our list of religious women's books and of incunabula these women once owned are a fitting scholarly coda to this partisan and convincing monograph. It is enriched by twelve illustrations and endnotes and a bibliography that match the high standards of the text itself.

Gendering the Master Narrative offers papers read at a 2001 conference at Fordham University. As the editors explain, both conference and volume were designed to follow on the heels of the volume they edited in 1988, Women and Power in the Middle Ages. However, this new set of papers is not meant to offer historiographic surveys of “progress” since 1988 (except for Joann McNamara's “Women and Power through the Family Revisited”) but rather to stand as examples of recent work highlighting varieties of social and intellectual building blocks in the “resistance to hierarchical domination” (p. 2). Such work, like other parts of our scholarly armory, has grown more multifaceted and interdisciplinary in the intervening years.

As we all say when undertaking a task of this sort, it is impossible to do full justice to the riches of such a collection. The papers mostly focus on England, and each reader will have her or his favorites. But to impose some order, I turn first to papers that radiate around the women-as-readers theme, though this time I include speaking and looking as variations of reading regarding how women's consciousness was recorded and transmitted. A few other papers, touching social relations and the material world, stand apart and merit some mention, along with McNamara's essay.

Dyan Elliott's paper on confession tells how women's words were the route to empowerment, as their articulation of spiritual and mystical experience and reflection expanded, while simultaneously putting them under control of their confessor (read inquisitor, writ small) and his willingness or ability to record what had been said. Nicholas Watson explores the various uses that were made, or that could have been made, of the Ancrene Wisse: a guide to lay spirituality, to women's spirituality, to private devotional reading, and (once again) to bridging the gap between cloister and hearth. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne does a survey of hagiography produced for female “consumers”: which saints (as in the Campsey manuscript), where they were written (mostly in East Anglia), and for whom (presumably, women readers and auditors). Wendy R. Larson tells of the success enjoyed in the effort to maintain the popular cult of St. Margaret as a women-friendly one: virgin, martyr, a source of comfort for mother in childbirth. Pamela Sheingorn offers a survey of depictions of St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read. She taps an iconography that often shows an opened book, and sometimes the lessons were conducted while Mary was juggling child care with her own schoolwork. But we know that mature students with domestic responsibilities are apt to be very devoted, at least if and when time permits.

Beyond these papers the collection explores the “trope” of Dame Nature (Barbara Newman); the role of women in the parish (Katherine L. French); the design of urban housing and domestic space, as women helped shape them (Sarah Rees Jones); and the concepts and practice of domestic intimacy, with its concomitant social and gender leveling (Felicity Riddy). These papers, like those cited above, are mostly from established scholars who have already had some say on these matters, which means, once again, few surprises but valuable surveys, interesting assertions and suggestions, and valuable connections and correlations regarding spirituality, gender roles, and the “liminal” space between the medieval world we know, or deduce, from literary sources and the one we work to recreate from “hard” evidence.

The volume is dedicated to Jo Ann McNamara; this is generous and wholly appropriate. In McNamara's own paper at the start we are allowed to share her retrospective comments regarding the argument she offered, in 1973, with Suzanne Wemple concerning the conditions under which women might have a powerful say in matters of family and society.Footnote ² They argued then that in the early Middle Ages women were often able to be major players, though eventually losing ground as aristocratic families, patriarchy and primogeniture, and the male-bonded logic of feudalism came to shape society after the year 1000. Since they first wrote, McNamara notes that research has shown more continuity between (upper-class) late Roman families and early medieval ones than we once suspected. Furthermore, gender and the new definitions of male virtue and prowess (if not of virility), generated by the reform movement of the eleventh century, with its championing of celibate men, redefined and thereby reduced the position of sexuality and fecundity on the table of cardinal social virtues or obligations.

Barbara Harris's study of aristocratic women stands very far from Erler's look at women's books and reading. Harris's book is closer, in fact, to Lawrence Stone's massive and monumental The Crisis of the Aristocracy (1965), only now that world is seen from and recreated by the perspective of women's lives and interests, staked out by the stages and experiences of the feminine life cycle. That it took so long for a major monograph in “the new social history” to counter with the feminist and/or alternate slant to Stone is an indication of the scope of research, along with a reframing of the agenda, that have gone into Harris's study. It is two decades since she published work on the marriage of Elizabeth Stafford and the duke of Norfolk, and much of her work in the interval has been toward and in preparation of this comprehensive treatment.

Harris says in her introductory essay that she has worked to present the life of an upper-class woman in late medieval and early Tudor England as constituting a “career”; one designed to fill or fulfill the social and sexual roles expected of her. Indeed, this was a serious life's work, a project partly handed to her and partly one for her to shape. The women who survived and who have left a mark of note—and sometimes one of considerable distinction—were those who stand out in this “interplay of female agency and subordination” (p. 14), playing the game as social structure, family support, life-cycle contingencies, and personal inclination permitted. Some women, even near the top of the social pyramid, rarely got a chance to cast off the shackles of patriarchy, legal repression, and the aggressive ideology of feminine inferiority. Nor is it clear that all of them wished to do so; whether by choice or lack thereof, they did not buy into the agenda we might like to map out for them. But others of their world do stand up to offer grist for our mills. They used the law that helped widows when that role became their lot, or they enlisted the aid of fathers and brothers when husbands and in-laws proved refractory, or they petitioned Thomas Cromwell or even the royals when personal connections or the peculiarities of their grievance made this a route worth trying.

In going through a woman's probable life-cycle experience there is no shortage of cases to pick and choose, given the relatively voluminous public and private records that survive from the turn of the sixteenth century for families of lofty stature. After a general essay on a woman's lot, instructive regarding law and the prevailing ideology about gender and the sexes, Harris leads us on in life: daughters, marriage, wives, single women, motherhood, and widows. In addition, we have instructive chapters on “Beyond the Household …,” on patronage and extrafamiliar networks, and on life at court (“Their Brilliant Careers …”), for those tapped for this exceptional and (often) lucrative elevation. The presentation is a blend of general reflections, an occasional reference to statistics, and lots and lots of examples and case studies.Footnote ³ Apart from the usual suspects of published sources and scholarly literature, this long-developing study rests on a vast amount of archival work, an activity for which Harris's enthusiasm waned neither with the years nor the publication of her many comparable but more limited studies.

When I said at the start that the lack of surprises in these books was a tribute to the scholarship of the last generation, I particularly had this book in mind. What we learn is much what we now expect to learn, thanks in good part to Harris herself; there were limited but possible openings and roles for women, at most stages in their lives, where they inclined to look for them and where they were able to garner a modicum of male support. This was true for daughters being pushed as young maidens onto the marriage market, as when we look at the Earl of Southampton's daughters (p. 50). It was true for wives, some in mutually supportive relationships and encouraged by partners who needed or wanted their involvement in the collective family role, as when we compare Lady Anne Lestrange and Eleanor, Countess of Rutland (p. 67). It was true for many a widow, now fighting for her share of property, perhaps even quarreling over such bread-and-butter matters with her own son, as was Dame Elizabeth Whethill (p. 136). It was certainly true for women who spent time at court, like Lady Jane Guildford (p. 218), or who presided over regional social circles, as did Dorothy Josselin of Essex (p. 182).

The conclusion that we take away is that lives, then as now, were negotiated texts. Some were controlled and given more shape by the agent, others were more at the mercy of external forces. At least for many women the ability to play these “others” against each other, and the knowledge of where to find and when to slip through cracks in the system, and of when to nod “yes” while keeping their fingers crossed, was an active strategy, a mechanism for coping with the burden of having been born female. Sisterhood often meant realizing that silence and seeming compliance might be of more value than an assertive feminist claim in a world of male chauvinism. Sisterhood was not without power, nor was it invariably a losing hand.

These books, read together, are progress reports on aspects of a larger agenda, rather than studies that directly complement each other. In reading them and looking for common ground, as well as noting their ability to follow so many divergent paths, two general comments come to mind.

The first, perhaps revealing more about the reviewer than what is under review, is an assertion that we are inclined to talk more about “theory” than to be led or sidetracked, by its role in historical analysis. In the introduction to Gendering the Master Narrative, Erler and Kowaleski refer to the contributions of Foucault and Judith Butler. Given the eclectic and syncretic nature of historical inquiry (regardless of the details of academic discipline), anything we can apply is useful. And yet our explorations of the past should not have needed the strictures of the former to alert us to “posing models of resistance to hierarchical domination,” nor the latter to sensitize us to a “consciousness of the performative nature of gender.” This is not intended as a knock at Foucault or Judith Butler. Rather, it is to remind historians of how difficult, and therefore of how necessary, it is to question the prevailing paradigms of historical understanding and of the process of “recreating” a comprehensible picture of a world no longer with us.

This leads me to my final reflections. Virtually none of the work presented by our fourteen authors (including Hurlburt) rests to any serious extent on sources unavailable to a serious student in the days when women's history barely merited passing mention in survey courses, let alone in research seminars. At the Fordham conference of 2001 Judith Bennett talked of the intriguing challenge to “add women and stir” to the most master narrative of all, that of the text book used in the undergraduate survey course in medieval history. The raw materials for the products now being so well crafted and put on display in the volumes under review here were as accessible as were those being regularly utilized to tell of the constitution and the House of Commons, or of aristocratic rebellion and deposition, or of episcopal election, and even of gender (though we knew it not under that term). Maybe the truth is not only in the details but also lies in our approach to and our choice of those details.