92ARTHURIANA Normans may have appropriated Arthur so that his prestige might ensure their possession of the island (p. 100). Donald Maddox, in 'Epreuves et ambiguïté dans Le Bel Inconnu (pp. 67-82), points out that the test of the Fier Baiser initiates a number of'specular encounters,' in which, as readers ofMaddox know, a character's identity, background, and potential are revealed to him. There remain two essays. Delphine Piraprez's 'Chrétien de Troyes, allégoriste malgré lui? Amour et allégorie dans le Roman de la Rose et le Chevalierde h Charrette' (pp. 83-94) suggests that Chrétiens romance invites allegorical interpretations more than does Guillaume de Lorris's poem. Finally, Geert Claassens's study of 'Le narrateur en tant que personnage dans Ie Lanceloet en het Hert met de Witte Voet (Lancelot et le cerfau pied bUnc)' (pp. 19-33) considers both the density and the function ofnarrative interventions in this briefMiddle Dutch romance. One purpose ofthe interventions, according to Claassens, is to harmonize this text with aspects of the Lancelot Compilane, within which it stands. The contents of this book are naturally uneven in quality, and most of the contributions are relatively traditional in approach and methodology (an observation that I do not intend as a condemnation). The volume nevettheless offers several provocative essays ofsignificant interest and importance, and it clearly merits the attention of Arthurians. NORRIS j. lacy Pennsylvania State University Mary c. erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval Engknd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 228. isbn: 0-521-81221-6. $60. Mary C. Erler's important new book, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval EngUnd, offers as its central theme 'the permeability of female lay and religous culture' at the end of the English Middle Ages (5). In Erler's discussion, this provocative idea extends well beyond the by now widely recognized similarities in female lay and religious devotional expressions to include, for instance, lay women's involvement in enclosed religious communities and the 'social centrality' offemale religious communities in secular life, the imitation ofthe religious life by lay women and the imitation ofsecular domestic arrangements within religious communities, and in particular the liminality represented by the vowess, who simultaneously inhabits both spheres. Taking as her starting point the histories recorded in and by surviving women's books, Erler reveals the intersections oflay and religious culture by identifying several networks ofwomen readers whose lives and connections aptly demonstrate the cultural permeability she posits, but whose relationships and interconnectedness have been previously all but invisible. Erler begins with the actual books themselves, and in doing so, contributes to the existing field of knowledge by providing appendices which list the manuscripts and incunabula owned by women but not included in earlier bibliographic studies: N. R. Ker's MedievalLibraries ofGreat Britain: A List ofSurviving Books 2nd edition (London, 1964) and A. G. Watson's Supplement to the Second Edition (London, 1987), and David Bell's What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries REVIEWS93 (Kalamazoo, 1995). She supplements the factual evidence provided by the marks and names in the books with a careful consideration of various other historical records, namely, wills and library records. Women, Reading, andPiety is an interesting and compelling study in several parts: in the first and last chapters, Erler provides an overview of English women's devotional reading, moving from institutional libraries and the exchange of books between nuns to the patterns ofwomen's religious reading in the first several decades of printing. At the centre of the book, Erler provides detailed descriptions of the overlapping reading practices, and social histories, ofseven book-owning and bookgiving late medieval English women, whose lives cross boundaries not just of lay and religious life, but also oforthodoxy and heterodoxy. Importantly, Erler's evidence and examples force readers to think across our own persistent historiographie and disciplinary boundaries of late medieval and early modern, manuscript and print, and this is a productive exercise, as her discussion shows. There are, however, some key gaps in the picture Erler provides, and though these gaps are acknowledged and accounted for, their absence is telling. First, Erler is only concerned with the...