Parishes, to summarise this book's central thesis, gave women opportunities for sociability and participation at a time when moralists worried about female assertion in the socio-economic upheaval after the Black Death. The argument is substantiated in six chapters, three of which rely on previously published articles. French shows how women (ch. i) adapted their domestic and economic skills (like cleaning, mending and brewing) to the more public activity of ‘churchkeeping’; (ch. ii) shaped distinctive para-rituals on occasions like churchings; and (ch. iii) enhanced their visibility through buying, decorating and changing pews in line with evolving personal and/or family status. She goes on to consider (ch. iv) how single-sex groups like maidens' stores, apparently undocumented outside England, provided rare opportunities for female corporate initiative and office-holding, while (ch. v) festive customs such as Hocktide (when parishioners captured members of the opposite sex for fundraising purposes) gave women financial clout and a chance temporarily to invert patterns of subordination. Finally, in ch. vi, she shows how the strong emphasis on virtues, works of mercy and meekness in clerical discourses and religious art reflected perceived ‘threats’ by disorderly alewives, gossips, masterless women and – perhaps – increasing female agency in parish affairs. A brief epilogue sketches continuities and change over the course of the Reformation, which forced women to adapt to a Church without saints and gilds, but – curiously – enhanced their (small) chances of serving as churchwardens. French draws on a vast range of records from different regional contexts (twenty-nine sets of parish accounts, 2,317 wills, various literary genres and visual sources, yielding thousands of pieces of information), leaving no stone unturned in order to discover evidence other parish and gender historians have overlooked. Two useful appendices list the fifty-three all-women's groups and forty-three locations with Hocktide celebrations which emerge from these sources. At times the material is stretched a little far (for example in the intricate analysis of gendered funeral arrangements or in the reconstruction of how women ‘felt’ on festive occasions), but on the whole the case is convincing. The elaboration of parish life in the late Middle Ages – pews, Hocktide and single-sex groups are all identified as fifteenth-century innovations – not only empowered the laity in general, but also women in particular, albeit in the latter case within clear socio-cultural limitations. Further original features of this book are the close engagement with material dimensions of late medieval piety (rings, robes, gifts, jewellery), the discovery of leadership among churchwardens' wives and the quantitative comparison of four heterogeneous sets of visitation records between 1397 and 1519 (suggesting, for instance, that Lincolnshire parishes with maidens' groups presented far fewer single women for sexual offences than the diocesan average). Overall, the author provides readers with an immensely differentiated impression of female roles in the English parish. Nuns, mystics and anchoresses were clearly not the only women playing active parts in late medieval religion.