Reviews 637 and asceticism. At the same time that virginity was made available to nonvirgins, models of holiness incorporated maternity and household, thus blurring the boundaries between narrowly defined professional virginity and the range of "honorary virginities" available to women in religious and secular contexts.Chapter 5 focuses on the career of an important widow and patroness, Isabella, countess of Arundel (d. 1279), including the saints' lives dedicated to and commissioned by her. Chapter 6 looks at the institutional rendering of female sanctity in the form of the abbess's vita. The lives of Audree, Osith, and Modwenna in the Campsey manuscript testify to the considerable power of the abbess, including "the power to found, the power to propagate spiritual genealogies and some institutional continuities, the power of vision, the power to keep records, the power to punish, to give counsel and alms, to preach, to intercede, to judge and lead" (p. 222). Contrary to the usual assumption of a "failing nunnery culture" (p. 189) in Britain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this chapter proposes a rich and varied culture in female communities and a textual tradition documenting the achievements of abbesses in this culture.The last chapter explores the "plenitude and range of female speech" in hagiography of this period, arguing for models of the "efficacious"-not to mention, theologically sophisticated-speech of women (pp. 223 and 224). From Clemence of Barking's Anselmian soteriology in her life of Catherine, to her use of the pagan Sibyl as a legitimating voice, to her vision of history in her life of Edward the Confessor, Wogan-Browne gives voice to seldom-heard women's voices and at the same time documents the strength, learning, verbal play, and sheer accomplishment in debate and dialectic that female hagiography dramatizes.The achievement of Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture is its articulation of a complex culture of textual production and reception in twelfth-and thirteenth-century female communities that crosses boundaries of court and convent, secular and religious. The book not only brings important arguments about the function of female hagiography to bear on a previously neglected period in medieval English literary culture but also challenges scholarship of the later Middle Ages to reconsider its narrative of the renaissance in female literacy set against the poverty of Anglo-Norman culture. The most exciting implications of Wogan-Browne's book are the vitality of women's literary culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the vast amount of work that still needs to be done.
