Lezlie Knox has produced the first full-length study that attempts to move beyond the foundation myths of Franciscanism to historicise the development of its female order. She emphasises the ambiguous position of Clare of Assisi in the order that bore her name and seeks to distinguish the historical Clare from the image of her created by subsequent generations, as they vied with each other to impose their vision of the mendicant vocation. The initial chapters of the book survey the historical development of ‘female Franciscanism’ from Clare's own life through to the end of the fourteenth century. Knox deftly sidesteps the ultimately fruitless debates over how to recover the authentic voice of Clare, and suggests that Clare's own role in the growth of the Clarisses was limited at best. She argues persuasively that this process was driven, not by the nuns' interest in emulating the values of their nominal founder, but by the desire of successive popes to regularise diverse communities of female religious within a single order, whose supervision by the friars was to be the critical marker of their identity. The second half of the book examines the rekindling of interest in Clare as a symbolic figure during the fifteenth century as part of the debates around Observant Reform. Knox demonstrates how memory of Clare and her hagiographic tradition were now invoked and manipulated by the nuns and friars alike to provide new models of spiritual authority that articulated their conceptions of Franciscan identity. The book challenges the idea that religious women should be evaluated as a single, undifferentiated category, set in contrast to their male counterparts, which has led to their repeated marginalisation from wider-ranging discussions about notions of spirituality or institutional identity (as much amongst modern historians as amongst the medieval friars). Instead, Knox convincingly reincorporates both Clare and her successors within the wider history of Franciscanism and portrays them as active participants in the contest to shape how that movement came to be defined.