Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, each well-established historian, nearly 20 years ago set themselves ambitious task of writing a collaborative, feminist history of women in early modern (p. 1). The resulting volume is solidly crafted product of intense and extensive study of published, manuscript, material and iconographic evidence. Handsomely published, it has footnotes, clearly reproduced illustrations, and both bibliography and index. Women in Early Modern England presents world where constraint dominates liberty, and continuity greatly outweighs change. Women saw themselves as guardians of things that mattered: world governed by rights and communal responsibilities, linked by bonds of religion and morality, family and (p. 435), faced with emerging world of unbridled masculine individualism. The substantive chapters begin with lengthy review of ideas (predominantly male) on women, as found in medical, religious, and legal writings, and in popular notions and stereotypes. Against this backdrop of misogynistic constraint, women lived lives further restricted by reproductive biology and -- all too frequently -- economic duress. Mendelson and Crawford explore these lives through discussions of women's life-stages (two chapters, one on childhood and adolescence, other on adulthood and old age, typical mark of maturation being marriage in one's mid-twenties), two chapters on women's economic roles (one on experience of poor women, other on middling sort). The chapters on life-stages provide clear accounts of menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, and menopause, and are exemplary in space devoted to young women and to older unmarried women, whether spinsters or widows. (As Mendelson and Crawford note, at any given moment, married women were minority in female population [pp. 124-125].) Analysis of lives of poor women works within paradigm of of makeshifts that Olwen Hufton developed to study labouring women in eighteenth-century France, while exploration of women of middling sort notes their growing exclusion from opportunities to earn money. Mendelson and Crawford note continuities of women's experience with work across barriers of rank: importance of accommodating reproductive work, tendency for paid work to be variations on work done without pay within family, and way standard accounts of the family economy distort women's tree experience of earning. The effects of 1563 Statute of Artificers, which enabled officials to force any woman between ages of twelve and forty into service, recur in these four chapters. Mendelson and Crawford write eloquently about an independent female and a female consciousness (pp. 202, 205). Female culture, they argue, drew on common elements to women's activities which cut across social barriers and helped to define entire female in binary opposition to male sex (p. 202). Working from evidence about how women used public space, used language, created material culture, expressed piety, explored friendship (including lesbian and possibly lesbian relations), Mendelson and Crawford posit female culture that co-existed with, and helped link, male popular and elite cultures. …