RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTurner shows with great care how literature and life come together in Chaucer’s writing ... She piles up fascinating evidence about women’s economic power in England after the Black Death, about the anxieties independent widows like Alison provoked in society, about women’s hopes for healing (and fear of assault) on pilgrimages... The history of women in the Middle Ages is fraught with uncertainties, especially when it comes to source material and authorship; Turner unfurls this complexity in elegant, quietly angry prose, grounded in deep scholarly research ... Turner’s biography of Alison of Bath demonstrates the stunning resonance of medieval prejudice in the present. But Turner also shows the many ways that writers through the centuries have subverted the misogynist canon: none more revolutionary than Chaucer himself.
Eden Collinsworth
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWith sometimes dizzying effect, Collinsworth vaults between granular detail and grand context. What the Ermine Saw bolts through wars and empires, art-making and state-making across the continent in the last 500 years ... The scale and subsequent restitution of the Nazi art thefts make for an enthralling story, and Collinsworth widens her focus to tell absorbing tales of heroic curators and art historians who painstakingly reassembled Europe’s cultural patrimony after the war.
