"Encyclopedic, explosive, pointed-these are the adjectives that leap to mind as I reflect back on the experience of reading D.H. Green's masterful study of medieval women readers, more specifically those we can identify in the written traditions and cultures of Germany, France, and England, from the earliest examples found in the eighth century, through the expansions of the exuberant twelfth, and on into the teeming world of the late Middle Ages from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century." -Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Boston College "At every point, Green is sensitive to the different ways of assessing available data. Thus the (negative) exclusion of women from public space yields the (positive) "room of one's own" for women's personal reading; the idealizing tendency of courtly literature can nevertheless suggest the plausibility of women as readers, and so on." -Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Boston College "In sorting through the accumulation of named and unnamed women, Green helps us value not only their growing mass but also where they lead us in understanding how women operated as readers (in Latin or the vernacular), whose literacy may or may not have needed support from the more literate around them,whether male or female." -Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Boston College
