Strong Women explores the literary lives of two medieval and two early modern women: Dorothea of Montau (1347–94), Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–ca. 1440), Mary Ward (1585–1645), and Elizabeth Cary (ca. 1585–1639). Wallace argues that each of these figures is a mulier fortis, a strong woman, and in the course of four absorbing and well-constructed case studies, he combines historical and literary analysis to demonstrate both the fortitude of these women, and the extent of the suffering they underwent because of their lives and beliefs. The four are linked by their religion—all pursue what Wallace calls “highly distinctive models of Catholic practise” (xx) — and by the remarkable ways in which their lives have been preserved and presented in writing. Dorothea's Leben, which appeared in 1405 and was printed in 1492, was compiled and presented by her confessor, Johannes von Marienwerder, and in his editing of her experience, he places great emphasis on her bodily mortification: she tortures herself, we are told, “until all these individual wounds looked like one single big wound and her body resembled a ploughed field” (10). No less startling is the extent of von Marienwerder's control over her textual presentation, and Wallace demonstrates how her compiler sternly and repeatedly warns Dorothea's readers off any skepticism about the devotion he presents so compellingly.

Dorothea was canonized in 1976, a result of pressure from German Catholics who had been expelled from Prussia in 1945. In chapter 2, having noted that her life in many ways closely parallels Dorothea's, Wallace demonstrates how the modern afterlife of another medieval woman, Margery Kempe, was equally responsive to twentieth-century feeling. The Book of Margery Kempe was first identified in 1934, and published in modernized form in 1936, and Wallace shows persuasively how its presentation responded inevitably to the approach of war in Europe: for readers and reviewers of both the 1936 edition of her Book, and the 1940 Early English Text Society edition, it was important that Margery's Englishness was emphasized, and her links to the Continent (and particularly to Germany) downplayed. However, Wallace fascinatingly demonstrates how Margery's story was resurrected for the twentieth century in ways that are attuned to gender politics as well as nationalism, in that the scholarly and editorial achievements of Ruth Meech and Hope Emily Allen were consistently overlooked, in favor of male contributors to the editorial project such as Sanford Meech.

Like that of Elizabeth Cary, the life of Mary Ward of Yorkshire was recorded, unusually, by women: her sister Barbara, Mary Poyntz, and Winefrid Wigmore. However, she was no less troublesome to men than her medieval forebears had been, setting herself in opposition to the papal bull Pastoralis Romanis Pontifici (1631) in her refusal to remain immured, and attracting widespread censure: Thomas Rant complained that women like Mary “are a threat to the women of England and a scandal to Catholics” (143). Fascinated by bodily mortification and resistant to marriage, Ward also played with class boundaries, dressing as a servant and deliberately sleeping next to an infected servant girl in order to catch “the Itch” (154). Much of the appeal of Wallace's rewarding study lies in his inclusion of such anecdotes, and his last subject, Elizabeth Cary, was equally provocative, with her conversion to Catholicism — what Wallace memorably terms “an unspeakable act in the stables” (205) — proving particularly trying to her mother and husband.

Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam (ca. 1605) amply demonstrated her awareness of the power of female speech, and the ways in which such speech was threatening to men. Mariam perishes in Cary's tragedy, but her own life is recorded by her Catholic son and daughters: for the mulier fortis, Wallace argues, “paternal authority is continuously diminished by feminine access to a higher truth” (235). As much as they may suffer male authority in its many forms, these medieval and early modern women could and did resist, and found strength in their diverse recourses to Catholicism. Wallace's groundbreaking and fascinating work will be of interest to feminist scholars, historians, and all those concerned with the premodern female experience, and the evolution of Catholicism in England and Europe.