Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England. By Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. x + 244. $49.95.

Congratulations to the University of Pennsylvania Press for publishing this remarkable, original book. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing have once again produced a work that interweaves the historical, the critical, and the theoretical. Since Anglo-Saxonists and many other medievalists tend to shy away from the theoretical in favor of either the historical or the critical, some presses might be worried about scholarly reception of the sort of web that Lees and Overing weave. But the combination is necessary, even constitutive of the book's achievements. The book manages nothing less than a new understanding of women's presence and absence in Anglo-Saxon "clerical culture."

Carol Braun Pasternack
University of California, Santa Barbara