Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages is an impressive volume of essays that ranges across academic disciplines, countries, time periods, and sources in order to contribute to key debates about women's history and role in intellectual life throughout the medieval period. The editors, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, and John Van Engen, set out to “tak[e] early women intellectuals and leaders seriously,” as the title of Kerby-Fulton's introduction puts it, and in this aim it absolutely succeeds.

The twenty-one individual essays are organized into six sections addressing, in turn, the intellectual life of Jewish and Muslim women, authorship of known women writers, rediscovering lost women writers, patronage and power, women in ecclesiastical settings, and laywomen's leadership. Each part includes a preface tying together the main ideas and suggesting a framework for reading the following chapters. Often these prefaces add significantly to the reading experience, as when David Wallace's preface to part two, “Authorship, Intellectual Life, and the Professional Writer,” makes a claim for reading these women's writings using an “institutional model” (75) that recognizes the collective effort expended in their production.

Inevitably with a volume of this size, some of the sections are more coherent than others. The chapters in part three, in particular, address the same issue from different but complementary angles, and offer an impressive range of solutions to the problems of recovering lost women's authorship. On the other hand, while the essays in part one on Jewish and Muslim women's intellectual life are excellent, I question the decision to group these chapters together merely on the basis that the women discussed in them are not Christian. Adrienne Williams Boyarin's chapter, “Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women at Court,” for example, focuses on women's use of documentary and legal means to sue for their rights and seems to have more in common with chapters in a later section in the volume such as Amanda Bohne's chapter on widows and their wills. Asma Afsaruddin's chapter on women's authority in the premodern Muslim world, while sharing an Andalusian focus with S. J. Pearce's chapter on women poets, addresses women's roles in intellectual life and religion, concerns echoed in the chapters in part five, on women's leadership in religion. The choice to separate Jewish and Muslim women into their own section seems slightly out of step with the overarching goal of the volume: to normalize all women as intellectual figures and leaders throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.

There is an extremely impressive spread of case studies from across Europe, with at least one chapter, and most often several, covering material from England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries. This range is matched only by the vast array of sources considered, which is one of the great strengths of Women Intellectuals and Leaders. An incomplete list of the material analyzed throughout the chapters would include poetry, saints’ lives, charters, stained glass, manuscript glosses and illuminations, fabric, jewelry, wills, paintings, letters, chronicles, liturgies, and ordination rites. The scope of the source material is matched by the methodological diversity, with analyses ranging from a close examination of manuscript glosses to demonstrate anchoresses’ literacy in Latin (Megan J. Hall), a reading of stained glass to show laywomen's leadership roles in British saints’ cults (Rachel Koopmans), and a thorough and useful overview of scholarship on women's ordination that makes a claim for understanding ordination differently before the early thirteenth century (Gary Macy).

As there are so many chapters, I cannot treat all of them individually, but many of them offer readings that will affect whole fields of study. To give just one example, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's chapter, with an appendix of Ian Short's philological work on the four texts attributed to Marie de France, argues that there were four separate Marie figures, rather than a single author of all four texts. She asks the reader “why we should even want just one writer, Marie?” (175). It will not be possible in future to write on Marie de France without engaging with Wogan-Browne's argument here that she is a later composite authorial figure. Many of the other chapters in this volume will have similar effects.

Women Intellectuals and Leaders displays a laudable concern with how these medieval women's stories will be received in the present. The issues of women's ordination, women's involvement in religious teaching, and women's intellectual contribution are all very much live ones, and analyzing women's roles in the past inevitably bleeds into discussion of women's roles in the present. Kerby-Fulton's introduction addresses this issue head-on, ending with a section headed “Women's History is not Just a Museum: Medieval Problems and Modern Continuities.” Gemma Simmonds's essay on Mary Ward, too, speaks to the long-term relevance of medieval women's religious lives to contemporary religious expression.

As John Van Engen's conclusion puts it, there is “no party line” in Women Intellectuals and Leaders, but instead a shared “enthusiasm about alternate angles of vision, more ways of approaching and telling the stories of medieval women as actors and thinkers and writers” (400). This broad scope and intellectual depth mean that all scholars of women's writing, women's history, and women's role in religion will find something here to interest them.