Medieval Women in Letters: Letters by Women, to Women, and about Women in Medieval Literatures, ed. Elisabetta Bartoli. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 66. Turnhout: Brepols, 2025, xiii, 376 pp., 6 color ill.

Already quite some time ago, literary-historical researchers had begun to take more seriously the genre of epistolary narratives, i.e., letters, especially those composed by women or addressing women because those texts provide unique access to women’s lives, their literacy, their social networks, and their public and private standing at their time. The present volume contains a number of valuable studies that offer new approaches and also introduce letter collections that have not yet been investigated. Older research, however, seems to have been mostly ignored, which is a considerable disappointment. But first some words on the framework from which this volume emerged.