The title of this volume may lead those familiar with recent writing on Clare of Assisi and her followers to expect a contribution to a debate initiated in 1995 by Werner Maleczek on the dating and validity of the ‘privilege of poverty’, the exceptional permission to refuse property awarded to Clare and her community. In essence, Maleczek argued that the language and diplomatic form used in the privilege were inappropriate for the chancery of Innocent iii and proposed that the text may have been forged in the fifteenth century as a manoeuvre in disputes over reform. In the following year Niklaus Kustner questioned Maleczek's circumstantial case for the forgery, but there has not yet been a convincing response to Maleczek on his home territory of chancery language and diplomatics. This is not however the territory which interests Mueller. Although she cites the relevant articles in a note, she simply sidesteps the issue, dating the privilege to 1228 (Honorius iii) and characterising it as ‘falling in love with the poor Christ’ (p. 106). Her concern is with a different controversy, that over the separation of women and men in the Franciscan order and the validity of a vow of poverty by the wealthy. She rejects either the male-only view of the early order (writing of ‘Franciscan complementarity’, p. 18), or that of what she identifies as ‘feminist theorists’ who suggest that the men ‘arm-wrestled these women into cloistered silence’ (p. viii). The book thus serves as a welcome account of the shifting relations between female Franciscans, their male brothers and prelates, and the struggle that male sacramental and practical responsibility for and to women created, placed in the context of the politics of the day. She suggests that men originally needed the women's houses as places for rest and respite, but that once they became more monastic, the women became a burden. The keys to success for the women were thus a ‘politically adroit’ Clare (p. ix) and Agnes's political weight, since she could and did negotiate with the popes, interceding on their behalf with her royal brother in exchange for papal concessions on her rule of life. The popes come off rather badly in this account, but Mueller succeeds in proposing a new angle on a familiar tale of contrasting viewpoints between women religious, determined to live utterly without temporal guarantees, and male clergy concerned for both their own respectability and the security and integrity of women religious. The author has produced a cluster of recent publications on the letters of Clare to Agnes (2001, 2003), material summarised and contextualised here in chapters iii, iv and vi. The same commendable, documentary approach is central to this volume. She reconstructs each moment in the careers of Clare, Agnes and their communities by juxtaposing the different sources (illustrated with images from the ‘Clare panel’, painted in 1283). She does too little however to recognise the difference between genres, or their limitations. Thus papal bulls are used alongside hagiographical and later narrative sources such as the Chronicle of the twenty-four Generals (mysteriously, the chronicle of the Franciscan, Salimbene, is listed as a secondary source). Some of the sources used were based on oral tradition or pious invention or, if we are being optimistic, on earlier texts. This does not make such material any less interesting, but it does make a discussion of its reliability for relating a sequence of events a sine qua non. The only source which is subjected to such detailed discussion is the second version of the life of Francis produced by Thomas of Celano in the 1240s, and that appears to be because it can be seen as an (inconvenient) apologia for the separation of the brothers and the sisters (p. 99) whose instigator, Crescentius, is described as ‘an educated but old [!] man, remembered for his cruel and unrelenting campaign against the zealots’ (p. 97). Most problematic of all, Mueller is too keen to encourage the reader to empathise with and admire the women. To take one early example among many, she tells us that on the day that Clare heard Francis preach and chose to convert, her friend Bona di Guelfuccio, was not present ‘Clare [having] encouraged her go to Rome to observe Lent’ (p. 7). Clare's role in persuading Bona (which might appear as evidence of a precocious leader) is not recorded in the process of canonisation to which the footnote refers, which states only that Bona ‘non fo presente, perché allora era andata ad Roma per fare la quarantena’. We are repeatedly told what ‘Clare thought’ or ‘Agnes knew’ or that popes were ‘annoyed’. Similar imaginative insertions about inner feelings and reactions lead the author to assert that ‘the thought of a marital arrangement, with its intrigue of money and power, sent a shiver through Clare's frame’ (p. 8). The price of empathy here appears to be historical precision. Readers will make up their own minds about the importance of this, but in the opinion of this reviewer, extensive use of the sources brings with it a responsibility to acknowledge their limitations and to draw the lines clearly between what is the source and what is poetic licence, something the author simply does not do. That said, Mueller knows the texts intimately and although she is less secure on the wider background – using Van Cleve's 1972 study of Frederick ii for the imperial context as though nothing had been published on the subject since – she brings to life a world which is at once fascinating and problematic.