Both the title and the author—writer of the famous and influential book From Memory to the Written Record—excite the would-be reader. But there is a warning in the subtitle Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages. How are the title and subtitle related? The book consists of seven chapters, comprising an introduction followed by six reprints of articles published between 1983 and 2011. The title of the book in fact turns out to be the title of Chapter 2. We are not told whether the articles have been revised, but it appears not and that only the number of illustrations has been augmented (and presumably rephotographed; all forty-nine are in colour and of excellent quality). In their subject matter the former articles are closely interrelated, and this leads to considerable repetition of references to the same pieces of evidence, mainly books and pictures, which some readers may find disconcerting.