Susan M. JohnsReviews

This book does as it says on the tin: Susan Johns looks at how Anglo-Norman women expressed power and lordship in the twelfth-century, focusing particularly on charters, seals, and government records like the Rotuli de Dominabus. Johns' conclusions about the intersections of gender and class are persuasive, as is her call to consider the family as a unit of lordship in the High Middle Ages. However, this is one of those books which a little too clearly first saw life as a dissertation—the beginning of each chapter read a bit too much like wading through a lit review, and the book as a whole read as choppy rather than as a unified argument.½