You win some, you lose some. When I'm book shopping, I often don't have the time to determine whether the intriguing reference in the table of contents will pay off in the actual content. I'll probably be putting this book on my give-away shelf, but it did provide me with one useful lead (as noted below).
I have something of a collection of passing references to historical anecdotes that seem worth tracking down, where the original mention didn't include enough specifics to find a publication immediately. This is the case with "Denise of Clapton" who was mentioned in some long-ago Usenet thread on medieval women who fought in armor as men. There were enough specifics in the original reference (12th century, England, the context of the event) to give me confidence that there was some actual historic evidence behind it. But I've been completely unable to track down more. In some cases, I have a clear publication citation but haven't yet found a copy of it to review. This is the case with one of the "two women buried with a memorial in the style of a married couple" references where the publication is an obscure local church journal.
And in some cases the reference is treated as one of those "everyone knows about this" events but no details are given. This the case for the "Queen Eleanor and her ladies cross-dressing on crusade" anecdote. Morrison finally provides an author and context for the motif, as well as the information that Eleanor doesn't appear to have been mentioned by name in the text (only by implication), which may account for the lack of specifics in other sources. (Although more likely it's one of the "telephone game" things where people are simply repeating versions of what they read in unsourced references.) Given that, it may still take me some time to find the reference in the original work, because what I have is a pdf scan of a nearly 400-page volume in which the original Greek text is glossed in...Latin. Oh, and there's no index or table of contents. (That is, there may be an index and table of contents, but what I have is an excerpt from a multi-volume edition of various religious texts, so there's no index and TOC in the file I have.)
But I rather enjoy finding, pinning down, and presenting this sort of primary source material. Because too often what we get is the results of a telephone-game that has been re-shaped according to the desires of those passing it alone. Often, the full original text and context is even more interesting than the sound-bite. Sometimes, the original context undermines how the sound-bite version has been presented. And that, too, is valuable. This is what a researcher's life looks like, even an amateur researcher like me.
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