General Histories:

Ennen, Edith. The Medieval Woman. trans. Edmund Jephcott. Basil Blackwell Ltd: Oxford, 1989.

Shahar, Shulamith. The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages. Trans. Chaya Galai. London: Metheun, 1983. (A bit dated)

Specialized Histories:

Amt, Emilie, ed. Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1996. (excerpts from primary texts by and about women arranged by topic)

Ferrante, Joan M. To The Glory of Her Sex: Women's Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. (history of women as authors, patrons, readers and their ability to influence the type, content, and focus of texts)

Hambly, Gavin. Women in the Medieval Islamic World. London: St. Martin's Press, 1998. (series of articles arranged chronologically on various aspects of women's lives in Islamic areas)

Leyser, Henrietta. Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500. Phoenix: London, 1996. (demonstrates clearly what types of information is available to historians, from archeological finds to written records, and how these can be read to reveal the past)

McNamara, Jo Ann. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. (sweeping history of nuns from the holy land to the new world)

Histories of Women Writers:

Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. (Information about women writers and excerpts from their texts)

Wilson, Katherina M., ed. Medieval Women Writers. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984. (Information about women writers and excerpts from their texts. Wilson and Dronke occasionally overlap, but not often)

Delany, Sheila. Writing Women: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern. New York: Schocken Press, 1983. (history about women writers, their context, background, and influences)

Histories of Women Mystics: Information and excerpts from the texts they composed, or were written about them.

Petroff, Elizabeth, ed. Medieval Women's Visionary Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (information about women mystics and excerpts from their texts. Includes some decidedly non-visionary material, which broadens its appeal)

Szarmach, Paul E., ed. An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. (information about male and female mystics, and excerpts from texts they wrote or dictated, or were written about them)

Zum Brunn, Emilie, and Epiney-Burgard, Georgette. Women Mystics in Medieval Europe. Trans. Sheila Hughes. New York, 1989, (Femmes Troubadours de Dieu, Belgium, 1988). (Information about women mystics, and excerpts from their texts, or texts that were written about them)

Web Sites:

Dorothy Disse's women writers before 1600. Excerpts, biographies, bibliographies

Sharan Newman's introductory bibliography to the Middle Ages

Rebecca LR Garber's biographies of medieval German religious women writers