Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages. By Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. vii-508; $50.

The double-entendre in the subtitle of this marvelous volume reflects its focus on medieval women both as reading subjects and as authors of lives and texts worth reading. the dialoguing voices alluded to in the main title are first of all those of medieval women and their contemporaries of both genders. But they are also the lively voices of a veritable who's who of North American and British medievalists. Olson and Kerby-Fulton's simple yet ingenious decision to invite eleven sets of author-partners to engage a shared topic and to organize the results as dialogues provides a uniquely stimulating framework for readers. Some of the response articles suggest new perspectives on the content of the first article in the pair, others are pointed rebuttals, and a few of the pairs are co-referential, indicating that the authors were in conversation as they wrote. This dialoging format is so effective that it makes one both wonder why it hasn't been done before and hope that someone else will again soon. It is what one often wishes, I think, such collections would be.

Kirsten M. Christensen
Pacific Lutheran University