In Bishop Jonas of Orléans's ninth-century advice book or “mirror” for the (especially male) lay aristocracy, four things made women desirable to men: genus, prudentia, divitiae, and pulchritudo. Valerie L. Garver uses these, translated as “family,” “prudence,” “wealth,” and “beauty,” to structure her book. Jonas's desideranda are reordered and glossed to serve as chapter titles: “Beauty: Appearance and Adornment,” “Family: Bonds and Memory,” “Prudence: Instruction and Moral Exemplarity,” and “Wealth: Hospitality and Domestic Management.” “Textile work,” the final chapter, combines all Jonas's characteristics: beautiful objects, the skills which demonstrated prudence, and the wealth which enabled aristocratic women to create valuable items and to further family interests through their production and deployment. The female lifecycle is the vehicle for conclusions. Garver discusses both lay and religious women, and, in contrast to some previous work, emphasizes what united elite women across this divide. Her focus is on Carolingian Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries. Severe source constraints confront all historians of ninth-century women. The Carolingian world is relatively rich in sources but not in material overtly concerned with women. Yet Garver has read widely. She uses the hagiographical material to particularly good effect, though caution is needed when comparing eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missions with some, more cloistered, examples of ninth-century female monasticism. Her methodology embraces the limitations of her sources. She does not read them against the grain, nor to address topics with which they were unconcerned, such as female friendship. The topoi and tropes of her—largely clerical—sources are not rejected, but read for what they, consciously and inadvertently, reveal. However, a “disciplined imagination” is invoked to guide frankly “speculative” readings (p. 12), and the results are not always convincing. Under “Wealth” attempts to flesh out previous historians' statements on household and estate management produce speculations, which are weak sustenance for strong assertions. By contrast, the chapter on “Beauty” deploys varied and unusual sources to good effect, underlining not only the nature and importance of this female capital but the tensions and ambivalences in attitudes toward it in a Christian society with the dual inheritance of asceticism and critiques of luxuria. The complex relationship of virtue, beauty, and adornment emerges strongly, and there is novel discussion of old age and appearance.