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Medieval women's roles in the production of religious rules (regulae or formulae vitae) have attracted little scholarly attention, for historians have traditionally viewed the creation of such rules as a strictly clerical undertaking. This perspective has underlined churchmen's normative powers and thus overlooked women's numerous direct and indirect ways of being involved in the writing of religious rules and related documents. While some religious women wrote rules for their communities, 1 many others contributed indirectly but importantly by petitioning clergymen to write rules for their communities or by sponsoring such productions. Religious women also exercised indirect power by modifying existing rules for their particular needs and sometimes even by choosing to ignore legislation that did not meet their demands. 2

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The book includes copious endnotes, a useful bibliography, a reliable index, ten handsomely reproduced color plates, and forty-two black-and-white figures. The text and notes tell what medieval Jews thought; the plates and figures show what they saw.

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