Recensione a Double Agents. Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (Philadelphia, 2001)

The review introduces the charactersitics of this complex book to an audience of historians, as its authors claim ‘the space between the literary and the historical’ and ‘do not expect to be historical enough for historians or literary enough for the literary scholars’. The reviewer has tried to go beyond the dense theoretical formulation which characterizes the volume but has also pointed out that the book 'suffers from a continuous tension between the need to historicize the material and the openly declared intention to avoid any sort of progression or developmental model: while trying to set texts in their context and highlight changes throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, the authors are also eager to reject any developmental chronology in women’s history'.