Elizabeth Avilda Petroff admirably fulfils the apparently disparate aims she sets herself: to provide an advanced introduction for general readers to the women mystics of the later Middle Ages, and simultaneously to produce theoretically informed new readings for specialists ... her work is full of unexpected and illuminating juxtapositions ... She has a rare feeling for narrative, summarizing and retelling with flair; and she is a methodical close reader, attentive to style, who lays out the process of her own judgements. She is also a good historian. David Lawton, Medium Aevum, LXV.1

• I. Backgrounds 1: Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World 2: Unmasking Women: Medieval Responses to the Unknowability of the Lady 3: A New Feminine Spirituality: The Beguines and Their Writings in Medieval Europe 4: A Medieval Woman's Utopian Vision: The Rule of St. Clare of Assisi II. The Tradition of Holy Women: Change and Continuity 5: Eloquence and Heroic Virginity in Hrotsvit's Verse Legends 6: Transforming the World: The Serpent-Dragon and the Virgin Saint 7: "She Seemed to Have Come from the Desert": Italian Women Saints and the Vitae Patrum Cycle III. Women Mystics and the Acquisition of Authority 8: Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue 9: The Rhetoric of Transgression in the Lives of Italian Women Saints 10: Gender, Knowledge, and Power in Hadewijch Strophische Gedichten 11: Writing the Body: Male and Female in the Writings of Marguerite d'Oingt, Angela of Foligno, and Umilta of Faenza Index