A collection in which a group of leading historians of medieval Europe apply a gendered analysis to a series of questions ranging from the transformation of the Roman world and the Christian challenge to late antique masculinity, through canon law and Byzantine coinage to the childhood of medieval visionaries.

Pauline Stafford is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Liverpool and the author of Queen Emma and Queen Edith: queenship and women's power in eleventh-century England (Blackwell, 1997) and Queens, concubines, and dowagers: the king's wife in the early Middle Ages (2nd edn., 1998).

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker is senior lecturer in Medieval History and Medieval Studies at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands). She has published on historiographical and hagiographical topics, including Sanctity and Motherhood (1995) and is presently working on a book on female anchorites (recluses) in the Low Countries.