This book provides an excellent discussion of the extent of women's involvement in religious studies in Islam from early Islamic times up to the early Ottoman period (mid-sixteenth century). It mostly focuses on hadith studies but it also briefly touches on other fields of knowledge in which women were involved, such as fiqh, Sufism, calligraphy, and poetry. The book is very well written and offers a pleasant alternation of anecdotes, facts and statistics, primary and secondary sources. What the author does very well, is to discuss the historical, political, and social background of each generation of women scholars, in as far as this is relevant for interpreting the data, without overburdening the text with footnotes. The author does not pursue an ulterior motive in her discussion of women knowledge transmitters, such as trying to show that women were structurally discriminated, or that their historical presence in scholarship has been systematically downplayed, or that all of them were feminists avant la lettre, or something like that. On the contrary, she offers a balanced and detached discussion of the sociocultural factors that may explain the presence or absence of women in Islamic scholarship during different periods of time.