Women Medievalists and the Academy. Edited by Jane Chance. Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Pp. xlvi + 1073; 72 illustrations. $85.

Women Medievalists and the Academy, edited by Jane Chance, is massive in size and major in significance. Every library, private or public, would want to house it because it codifies the talent, determination, and at times heroic energy of women in a scholarly field that on occasion has shunned or circumvented women and their work as it has emerged as a major scholarly discipline. The collection is a welcome expansion of an approach earlier presented in the three-volume series Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies in the Development of a Discipline (1995–2000), by Helen Damico and †Joseph B. Zavadil (volume 1), which dealt with the lives of men and women medievalists who cleared the path for the emergence of the multidisciplinary branch of scholarship known as Medieval Studies. What Chance offers here is a feminization of the history of the discipline (as she implies in her introduction).

Helen Damico
University of New Mexico