Description:  Laura L. Gathagan’s Embodying Conquest is an unapologetically feminist biography of the powerful eleventh-century Norman ‘conquest queen’ centered on the mountain of administrative evidence she left behind. Instead of a traditional chronological approach centered on her life cycle, Gathagan uses the organizational metaphor of Mathilda’s body to subvert the impulse to consider her relationally as daughter, wife and mother. By contrast, Embodying Conquest uses the frame of body parts, not to suggest that Mathilda was defined by her biology, but instead to show how her actions as patron, judge and ruler embodied female power in a world we typical construe as primarily masculine. Mathilda was the ruler of England, a builder of monasteries, a judge and a patron. With her mouth, she dispensed justice. With her hands, she endowed religious orders. With her crowned head, she asserted female authority. She embodied power. Embodying Conquest examines her life in full by shifting the focus from a relationally reckoned narrative to one in which Mathilda’s actions are central.