This book disperses the shadows in an obscure but important landscape. Lisa Bitel addresses both the history of women in early Ireland and the history of myth legend and superstition which surrounded them. It is a powerful and exact book and an invaluable addition to our expanding sense of Ireland through the eyes of Irish women. --Eavan Boland author of In a Time of Violence: Poems It is refreshing to read in a book by a woman on medieval women that not all clerics hated women and that not all men were oversexed villains consciously bent on exploiting women. [Bitel] challenges not only the medieval Irish male construct of female behavior but she is also courageous enough to question constructs of medieval women invented by modern Irish medieval historians. --Times Higher Education Supplement