The “maiden in the tower” is an image that many historians have long dismissed as a literary invention, and yet as Gwen Seabourne argues, it has a strong basis in reality. Among the upper ranks of society, in particular, the abduction and confinement of women were all too familiar features of late medieval life. Unlike the maidens of medieval fiction, however, real women often suffered more at the hands of their captors than mere isolation. Intent to take revenge on the Bruce family for their rebellion against the English crown, Edward I ordered Isabel, countess of Buchan, and Mary, wife of Robert the Bruce, locked in diminutive cages made of iron and wooden lattice where he kept them for four years. While the fates of Isabel and Mary are extreme examples, other medieval women also endured physical violence: when Richard son of Elias le Lord and his associates abducted and imprisoned Eleanor de Bynise, they first assaulted her and stole £10 worth of her chattels. As Eleanor de Bynise’s case implies, the financial standing of these women made them prime targets. The value these women represented led others to attack not their riches but the women themselves: Richard I’s conquest of Cyprus led him to imprison the daughter of Cyprus’s leader, taking her as “war booty” (22). The terms of imprisonment were sometimes lengthy: while Eleanor of Aquitaine’s sixteen-year imprisonment is probably better known, English kings held Eleanor of Brittany (Arthur’s sister) captive for a total of thirty-seven years. Seabourne’s meticulous study examines the variety of creative ways the medieval English subjected women to abduction and confinement, focusing especially on women’s experiences of confinement and how those experiences altered over time.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses confinement at the king’s command. The first chapter in this section centers on women as political hostages. While family did not generally offer up women as hostages for security, English kings frequently imprisoned women as punishment for the crimes of their male family members. Unlike male hostages whose imprisonment was increasingly subject to legal regulation, Seabourne highlights the arbitrary nature of women’s confinement. With their confinement left wholly unregulated, women faced terms of imprisonment that their male counterparts would have considered cruel and unusual punishment. Chapter 2 is an extremely brief excursus on royal wardship and the guardianship of “idiots.” Why the king as guardian warranted such little space in a study of this nature is unclear (only six pages in total). While royal wardship has been the subject of copious study, very little ink has been spilled on the subject of the guardianship of the mentally disabled. Moreover, kings exploited both situations to their own profit, in much the same way as they benefited from prisoners of war. Chapter 3 focuses on the conditions of imprisonment. The status of these women generally dictated a sense of fairness in their treatment; nonetheless, generosity was far from the norm.

Part 2 represents a significant departure from political to legal interpretations of abduction and confinement. A study of ravishment, a subject that has left more than one historian with his or her head spinning, occupies most of part 2. Historians often translate ravishment as abduction; the medieval records, though, confound the issue by employing the same vocabulary for rape and even sometimes theft (raptus, rapere). Part 2 addresses this crime in a variety of ways. Chapter 4 focuses on legislation promulgated to address ravishment, explaining how that legislation evolved over time. Chapter 5 underscores “the sidelining of women” in common law disputes revolving around ravishment (128), noting the transition in emphasis from women’s suffering to men’s damages. The final two chapters in this section explore the popular debate over the nature of women’s agency in abduction. Whereas other historians (e.g., Sue Sheridan Walker, Emma Hawkes, Sara Butler, Shannon McSheffrey and Julia Pope, Caroline Dunn) have emphasized the collusive nature of some abductions, seeing them as “an alternative form of courtship” (145), Seabourne cautions us from drawing such a conclusion. Without offering much detail concerning her case material, she argues that “the case for widespread collusive abductions, attractive though it may be for those who wish to play down the idea of medieval lawlessness, or for those who wish to stress female agency, often rests on questionable assumptions” (160–61).

Finally, part 3 attempts to offer some balance to the subject by addressing situations in which women consented to being confined (e.g., in nunneries or anchorholds) and women’s participation in the confinement of others. Adding a little humanity to the subject, Seabourne notes that noble women were often inclined to advocate for bettering the treatment of political prisoners.

In her preface, Seabourne relates that she is a legal historian nervously foraying into the field of women’s history, hoping not to offend. Certainly, Seabourne needs to be commended for her interdisciplinarity and encouraged—the insights and training of legal history have much to offer women’s historians. The complexity of the practice of medieval common law generally has meant that social historians interpret the legal material imperfectly or avoid it altogether. Given the abundance of the documentation for social history, more trained legal historians need to follow in Seabourne’s footsteps. Her incursion into women’s history, however, is problematic in a number of ways. First, Seabourne writes like a legal historian. The writing is dry, often resembling a listing of case studies in which the historical figures are drained of their personalities. This highly legalistic approach may well deter those who have the most to gain from reading this study. Second, Seabourne’s exploration of women’s history does not extend sufficiently to the secondary sources. For example, when addressing the issue of a woman’s consent (to marriage, to sex, to confinement), rather than looking to modern day studies and referencing “Stockholm syndrome,” Seabourne should have looked instead to the work of medieval women’s historians and historians of the church courts who have written extensively on this subject. Medieval women were emphatically not modern women. “Stockholm syndrome” surely was not applicable in a world where women were rarely consulted about whom they wished to marry, where violence in marriage was applauded, and perhaps most disconcerting to the modern mind, women were often eager to be confined (even if only in a religious sense).