Barking Abbey has the distinction of being the only Anglo-Saxon double house that was still a female community at the time of the Dissolution. During its long history a number of notable literary works were produced by or for members of the community, and these were the subject of a conference in New York in 2009 that has given rise to this volume of thirteen papers. Relevant Anglo-Saxon literary works are reviewed briefly by Stephanie Hollis and Lisa Weston, and Jill Stevenson and Anne Bagnall Yardely discuss the later medieval liturgical innovations, including Easter plays that may have been composed by Katherine de Sutton (1358–76), the only one of the Barking abbesses to be included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But the bulk of the volume is concerned with Anglo-Norman and French works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and especially with Clemence of Barking's Vie de St Catherine. This last, a rare example of nun as author, is hardly an understudied work, and several papers provide continuations of current debates. One concern is whether Clemence was also the author of a French Life of Edward the Confessor that is attributed to a nun of Barking. Delbert Russell provides strong arguments in support of Clemence's authorship of both works, and that also seems to be the natural conclusion of Diane Auslander's identification of common themes. Clemence wrote in interesting times, and it remains uncertain whether she wrote when Mary Becket was abbess (1173–5) or under her successor Maud, an illegitimate daughter of Henry ii, but, as Auslander and Donna Bussell suggest, resonances of the Becket controversy inform her work. Barking is also linked with the French Life of Thomas Becket by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence who received hospitality and perhaps information from Becket's sister whose appointment to the abbacy of Barking was part of the king's reparations for his murder. A work that was dedicated to Abbess Maud was Le Gracial, a Marian miracle collection that is the subject of an interesting exploration by Emma Bérat of how it might have been interpreted within the community.

Barking was not only the oldest female community, but also one of the richest thanks to its early Anglo-Saxon benefactions. Several authors refer to the disruption, if not destruction, of the earliest incarnation of the nunnery in the Viking invasions. However, the survival of early charters, and the fact that many of the lands granted in them were held by the nunnery in Domesday Book and beyond implies some form of institutional continuity. Alexandra Barratt uses a memorandum on expenses written (in English) by a fifteenth-century cellaress to explore how some of the yearly revenues from its landed wealth were used to feed the nuns. Provisions were not as excessive as those enjoyed by Barbara Harvey's monks of Westminster, but not quite the simple fare envisaged in the Rule of St Benedict either. The nunnery's wealth underpinned other facets of its medieval history that emerge in the volume. Thomas O'Donnell, in a particularly effective paper, looks at the patronage and hospitality enjoyed by Goscelin, Osbert of Clare and Guernes at Barking, and how this aided the assimilation of both the authors and the nunnery into wider networks. Investment in books and learning was also supported by the abbey's generous income; Syon Abbey is the only nunnery to have a greater number of extant works from its medieval library. Sadly nothing survives of the nunnery's buildings, but Kay Slocum makes interesting use of Clapham's reconstruction of the Norman church to interpret Goscelin's narratives of the translations of its three saintly Anglo-Saxon abbesses, Æthelburh, Hildelith and Wulfhild, and the liturgies associated with them.

Several authors refer to their debt to the works of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne so it is fitting that she provides a typically incisive afterword to the volume that assesses its place in the historiography of English nunneries. As she says, the volume is a valuable beginning for the construction of a history of Barking Abbey and its literary culture, something that is much needed as the 1954 book by E. A. Loftus and H. F. Chettle is the only general study. The more outward-looking papers in the volume show awareness of the pressures on abbesses who were major landowners and ‘barons’ as well as religious leaders, but, as Wogan-Browne suggests, there is much more that could be done on this topic. She also draws attention to the potential for more work on the Anglo-Saxon and later medieval periods and their surviving texts and manuscripts. Some of this work is already out there. One might mention here the unpublished 2011 University of Liverpool Phd thesis of Casey Jane Beaumont whose study of Goscelin's cycle of texts for Barking provides a much fuller and more searching evaluation of the nunnery in the tenth and eleventh centuries than was possible in this volume. Nevertheless it is fascinating to trace in these essays and in other studies of the Barking community common themes that recur throughout its nine-hundred-year history. Emma Bérat, writing in the context of the twelfth century, refers to the ‘a community at once devoted to and at odds with the models set forth by the mainstream religious literature’, but her observations could be applied to other periods as well. There was a recurring tension between the nunnery as a religious institution and as a community of individuals with different familial and political ties. The mixed blessing of royal and aristocratic patronage and interference, and the often difficult relations with the bishop of London whose early incumbent Eorcenwald had been much involved in the foundation of Barking for his sister Æthelburh, are problems that occurred at several different periods and were often a stimulant for the production of texts. A fascinating book exploring such themes across time remains to be written, but collectively the essays of this interesting volume have much to contribute to such topics.