In The Embodied Word Female Spiritualities Contested Orthodoxies and English Religious Cultures 1350 1700 Nancy Bradley Warren expands on the topic of female spirituality first explored in her book Women of God and Arms to encompass broad issues of religion gender and historical periodization Through her analyses of the variety of ways in which medieval spirituality was deliberately and actively carried forward to the early modern period Warren underscores both continuities and revisions that challenge conventional distinctions between medieval and early modern culture The early modern writings of Julian of Norwich are an illustrative starting point for Warren s challenge to established views of English religious cultures In a single chapter Warren follows the textual and devotional practices of Julian as they influence two English Benedictine nuns in exile and then Grace Mildmay a seventeenth century Protestant gentry woman to shed light on the ways in which individual encounters of the divine especially gendered bodily encounters expressed textually signify for others both personally and socio historically In subsequent chapters Warren discusses St Birgitta of Sweden s imitatio Christi in the context of the importance of Spain and Spanish women in shaping a distinctive form of early modern Englishness strongly aligned with medieval religious culture juxtaposes the fifteenth century mystic Margery Kempe with the life and writings of Anna Trapnel a seventeenth century Baptist and treats Catherine of Siena together with the Protestant Anne Askew and Lollard and Recusant women In the final chapters she focuses on the interplay of gender and textuality in women s textual representations of themselves and in works written by men who used the traditions of female spirituality in the service of competing orthodoxies In five interwoven chapters Nancy Bradley Warren expands upon her distinguished previous work to explore the enduring symbolic and political importance of women s religious models in the secular as well as the religious realms By highlighting the interrelation of religious and political themes in a diverse group of women s lives and writings Warren brilliantly demonstrates how women shaped cultural connections between England the Continent during these tumultuous centuries Nicole Rice St John s University A pioneering cross period cross confessional transnational study of religious Englishwomen and their extraordinary physical textual corpus Highly recommended David Wallace University of Pennsylvania