SOURCE: Giedl, Linda. “Double Standard for Women Saints.” Christian Science Monitor 90, no. 152 (2 July 1998): B8.

In the following review of Impossible Saints, Giedl comments that Roberts is a skilled storyteller but that the novel is uneven in quality.

Among the summer offerings are two books by women about women—women saints, to be exact. Both are drawn from one of the remotest periods of Christian history, when the Roman Catholic Church was extending its influence all over Europe, and sainthood was a growth industry.

In their books, American scholar Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg and London-based fiction writer Michèle Roberts address the conditions, religious and secular, under which medieval women struggled to cope, contribute, and prevail.

Schulenburg places her historical study, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society ca. 500-1100, at the intersection of two currently burgeoning areas of historical research. One is hagiography, or the official accounts of...