Karen Rosoff Encarnacion and Anne L. McClanan, eds. The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe.(Book Review)

Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2001. xiv + 286 pp. index, illus. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-24001-5.

The editors of this anthology explain that it "began as a project in women's history intended to use material culture as a means of reexamining the possibilities of gaining access to the lives and experiences of medieval and early modern women" (2). The time is ripe for such an undertaking. Recent studies of material culture have offered a wealth of objects to be read and histories to uncover, but few have focused entirely on how these "things" can illuminate otherwise obscured paths of access to women's lives. Single-authored books such as Jacqueline …