This book presents a detailed case study of manuscript evidence for the agency of religious women living in the Anglo-Saxon cultural province in Francia, primarily in the Main Valley, in the decades around 800 ce. The agenda of the book is unabashedly feminist. Lifshitz argues that a handful of local manuscripts betray evidence that ‘the Christian culture of that region was thoroughly gender-egalitarian’ (p. 3). Not only were the texts copied in and produced for female religious communities in Karlburg and Kitzingen, but the editorial choices made by the scribes suggest that women created these manuscripts with the aim of defending their place in Christian culture at a time when the ecclesiastical reforms of the Carolingians were becoming increasingly hostile to the gender-egalitarian norms introduced by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, long recognised in the correspondence of Boniface and his circle. The first three chapters set the scene. Chapter i introduces the institutional framework for gender relations in religious communities in eighth-century Francia and the impact of the Carolingian reforms on this status quo. Chapter ii charts the religious landscape of the Main Valley by surveying male and female religious houses in the region in the early Carolingian period. Chapter iii describes in detail two clusters of books produced by women in this region, which provide the principle evidence for the study: the Gun(t)za and Abirhild manuscripts, all of which Bernhard Bischoff dated to the latter half of the eighth century. Part ii, comprising five chapters, examines the contents of these manuscripts and argues that the women who produced them deliberately chose to copy texts that aligned with their gender-egalitarian views or, even more strikingly, excised misogynist statements from otherwise valuable patristic commentaries and other such texts. These texts included Augustine's commentary on the Psalms, Gregory the Great's Gospel homilies, apocryphal acts of the Apostles (many of which featured women in important supporting roles), passion narratives of female martyrs, Isidore of Seville's Synonyms and florilegia like the Liber scintillarum. In example after example, Lifshitz's main point rings clear: ‘[W]omen's manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon cultural province in Francia showed how their books reflected and defended both women's integration into intellectual, cultural, political, and religious life (syneisactism) and gender egalitarianism’ (p. 193). This is a long, challenging and occasionally self-indulgent book that would have benefited from a firmer editorial hand, but this does not diminish its importance as a ground-breaking and meticulously researched work of feminist scholarship that convincingly employs manuscript evidence to argue for the agency of early medieval religious women in a climate of reform that was growing increasingly hostile to their value and purpose in the Christian tradition. Historians of early medieval monasticism, manuscript studies and gender studies will all discover important insights in this book.