grammaticality - Why does a pronoun as the predicate of an indirect object (e.g. "I gave her it") sound wrong?

Forgive me if I've used the wrong terms in the title, I did my best given my middle-school grammar lessons and Wikipedia.

"I gave her the book" sounds just fine, but "I gave her it" sounds stilted and awkward to me, and I don't know that I've ever seen that construction, with "I gave it to her" taking its place. It's not the two pronouns either, because "I gave Joan it" also sounds odd.

Is there a grammatical reason that such a construct isn't often used? Historical? And are there any other instances where simply substituting a pronoun makes a sentence similarly awkward?