In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Aelfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism and then turns to creating a historical and theological cultural context within which to locate an interpretation of Aelfric's portrayals of male and female saints.

Translating Europe in ?lfric's 'Lives of Saints' is the first study of the representation of European peoples, places, and geographies in the Lives of Saints, one of early medieval England's most famed works. It examines the Lives of Saints as a unified collection whose various items work cumulatively and concurrently to provide audiences with teachings far beyond the scope of an individual homily or saints' life. In doing so, it demonstrates that ?lfric's European characters and settings served not merely as a convenient skeleton on which to frame his hagiographical narratives, but rather lay at the heart of his didactic praxis and pedagogic aims. Luisa Ostacchini systematically compares each of the 30 plus items that comprise ?lfric's Lives of Saints to their Latin sources and to one another to highlight previously unnoticed patterns and formulae within collection. In so doing, she demonstrates that ?lfric's interest in community was both inward and outward looking: he sought on the one hand to situate England within the wider Christian world, and on the other hand to promote the internal unity of the English kingdom and the reformed monastic establishment. This book sheds new light on the ways that ?lfric wrote about the Christian world and England's place within it, and further illuminates of the didactic praxis and ideology of one of the most influential and significant authors of the early medieval period. Luisa Ostacchini is a college lecturer at St John's College, Oxford, where she teaches Old and Middle English literature.

Women's literary histories usually start in the later Middle Ages, but recent scholarship has shown that actually women were at the heart of the emergence of the English literary tradition. Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 focuses on the period before the so-called 'Barking Renaissance' of women's writing in the 12th century. By examining the surviving evidence of women's authorship, as well as the evidence of women's engagement with literary culture more widely, Diane Watt argues that early women's writing was often lost, suppressed, or deliberately destroyed. In particular she considers the different forms of male 'overwriting', to which she ascribes the multiple connotations of 'destruction', 'preservation', 'control' and 'suppression'. She uses the term to describe the complex relationship between male authors and their female subjects to capture the ways in which texts can attempt to control and circumscribe female autonomy. Written by one of the leading experts in medieval women's writing, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 examines women's literary engagement in monasteries such as Ely, Whitby, Barking and Wilton Abbey, as well as letters and hagiographies from the 8th and 9th centuries. Diane Watt provides a much-needed look at women's writing in the early medieval period that is crucial to understanding women's literary history more broadly.

Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.

A consideration of the theme of demons as teachers in early English literature.