'… superb … McLaughlin argues her point in lively and subtly amusing prose, sparked with effective quotations of medieval authors. Her book is perfect for classes on medieval politics and churches … Non-specialists can easily follow the argument, while fellow medievalists will appreciate the book's methodological innovations and evidentiary heft, and feminists will be glad to discover that it considerably advances the scholarly project of gendering the medieval past.' Lisa M. Bitel, The American Historical Review 'It is seldom that a book has the ability to make one fundamentally question one's previous assumptions and see things from an entirely new perspective, particularly when as here the subject matter is one that will be so very familiar to historians of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe. This book, however, does just that … McLaughlin offers a thoughtful, highly nuanced and altogether new (and quite probably apposite) interpretation of the conceptual ferment and domestic/sexual imagery that animated the polemicists and thinkers of the age of reform. All of this makes [this book] indispensable reading.' Kathleen G. Cushing, Early Medieval Europe