Alison Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria is based on the belief that the scriptorium was vital to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. Beach's focus on manuscript production at three rather different religious houses, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which influenced that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest to palaeographers as well as others interested in religious and gender history.