Dworkin’s Guide is a deceptively slender volume divided into two parts. The first comprises five analytical chapters, on (i) general conceptual and methodological issues, (ii) the sound system and spelling, (iii) inflectional morphology, (iv) syntax and (v) the lexicon, while the second consists of an anthology of prose texts. The book purports, with justification, to be ‘the first systematic description in English of Old or Medieval Spanish’ (x), although it is evidently designed to highlight the most important or best-known features of Old Spanish rather than to serve as a comprehensive reference work or to present far-reaching structural analysis. From that perspective, almost everything that one might expect to be included in the book is included; indeed, the Guide’s internal content achieves the impressive feat of exceeding the limitations seemingly imposed by the book’s external dimensions.

Chapter 1 addresses the familiar questions of nomenclature and periodization, together with regional variation in the Iberian Peninsula, the Latin–Romance interface and the nature of the textual record. The chapter also tackles the currently hot topic (in Spain at least) of discursive traditions. In general, Dworkin errs on the side of caution in this introductory section of the book, stressing the limitations imposed by what he terms the ‘manuscript culture’ (9) and concluding bluntly but no doubt correctly that ‘[t]oday’s student has no direct access to the discursive traditions of the spoken language’ (16).

Chapter 2 delineates the medieval Spanish phonology, foregrounding the emergent stop–fricative allophony, the phonemic split stemming from Latin /f-/, palatal phenomena, word- and syllable-final consonants and the sibilant system. As one would expect, much of the discussion centres on the extent to which sound patterns which in theory are likely to have existed are actually attested by the orthography.

Chapter 3, on morphology, is arguably the most comprehensive in the volume, in the sense that virtually all the formal paradigms of the medieval language are discussed, as is the morphological polymorphism that notoriously characterizes the medieval corpus. In keeping with the position he adopts in Chapter 1, Dworkin implicitly attributes the latter phenomenon to the manuscript culture, stating (32) that ‘it often results from the processes of copying and manuscript transmission over time and space, reflecting the differing linguistic backgrounds of scribes and copyists’. By the same token, it definitively does not, in Dworkin’s view, bespeak variation in usage, either in individual speakers or in any particular speech community.

In contrast to its predecessor, Chapter 4, on syntax, is overtly selective, the reader being referred to the multivolume reference work Concepción Company 2006–2015 for a more thoroughgoing treatment. The topics chosen by Dworkin for inclusion in his own Guide fall broadly into the areas of DP-related phenomena, word order, the prepositional accusative and clitic linearization/doubling, together with a relatively long section on aspect, mood and voice. Dworkin emphasizes the basic continuity between medieval and modern Spanish as regards syntax, but at the same time adopts a contrastive approach, focusing on areas in which the grammar has undergone change.

The final chapter, on lexis, is arguably the best of the five, which is unsurprising given Dworkin’s outstanding contribution over the years to research and scholarship in this area. Here his encyclopedic knowledge of Old Spanish really comes to the fore, from the devastating overview of scholarly resources pertaining to the medieval lexicon with which the chapter opens to the succinct but accomplished treatment of key concepts like strata, stability and doublets, the rich exemplification and the thoroughgoing description of derivational processes.

The remainder of the book consists of an annotated anthology of extracts from three Castilian prose texts, viz. the fourth part of the thirteenth-century historical compilation General estoria, the fourteenth-century didactic narrative El Conde Lucanor and the fifteenth-century Atalaya de las corónicas, a summary of earlier chronicles. Each text is briefly contextualized, while the extracts themselves are accompanied by copious notes that offer linguistic commentary or, where appropriate, cross-refer the reader to a specific section in the five descriptive chapters that precede the anthology. This second part of the book serves, therefore, to provide concrete illustrations of the more abstract points made in the first part.

By any reasonable measure, Dworkins’s Guide must be regarded as achieving the objectives set out in its Preface. In particular, the clarity of the exposition, allied to the abundant exemplification, will ensure that students and general readers derive significant benefit from this work, while the many footnotes and bibliographic citations will be useful to discipline-specific researchers seeking to enhance their own knowledge. That all of this has been achieved in little more than one hundred and fifty pages attests to Dworkin’s concise, even terse style, rather than to the omission of anything fundamental. In light of this positive assessment, then, my criticisms, such as they are, are minor ones.

Turning to these in no particular order, one might query the extent to which Dworkin emphasizes the destructive effect of the manuscript culture on linguistic analysis seeking to reconstruct particular synchronic slices of the medieval continuum. He is of course quite correct when he states (9) that ‘a mid-fifteenth century Castilian scribe copying a thirteenth-century work prepared in, say, a Leonese variety of Hispano-Romance would substitute unfamiliar Leonese linguistic forms or words with contemporary Castilian equivalents’, meaning that the resultant manuscript would be a composite of the author’s original language and later scribal modifications, calling into question any analysis that took the document at face value. However, the hypothetical case entertained by Dworkin, involving a big diachronic mismatch, combined with a somewhat smaller diatopic one, between the original and the surviving copies of the text, while not uncommon, is quite an extreme one. Much of the Alfonsine prose corpus, for example, illustrates the converse situation. Thus, of the twenty-one manuscripts transcribed by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies for their on-line digital library (Gago Jover Reference Gago Jover2011), fifteen are assumed to have been copied while King Alfonso was still alive, while the estimates for five of the remaining six allow for the possibility that they were copied either at the end of Alfonso’s life or less than two decades after his death in 1284. In addition, given Alfonso’s role in establishing the Castilian form of Romance as a language of culture, the assumption would be that diatopic inconsistencies of the kind highlighted by Dworkin are unlikely to be a major issue in this type of manuscript. So while it would, as Dworkin jocularly observes (14), be impossible to write a Labov-style book entitled The Social Stratification of the Speech of Thirteenth-century Toledo, a reasonably complete account of the standard syntax of that time, based directly on the contemporary textual outputs, seems to be eminently achievable. Moreover, while the Alfonsine corpus is uniquely useful as a tool for linguistic analysis, subsequent periods are by no means bereft of comparable material.

Arguably, then, Dworkin is a little too pessimistic in his remarks about the medieval manuscript culture. While many of the surviving textual artefacts are indeed a poor guide to the usage of the time when they were created (or of any historical time), care and judicious selection in corpus construction can obviate many of the difficulties potentially faced by the modern analyst.

Staying with the theme of manuscripts, it is moderately disappointing that the extracts from the three texts included in the Guide’s anthology are drawn from scholarly editions rather than the underlying manuscripts, which have each been faithfully transcribed under the auspices of the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies and made available in electronic format. The editorial adjustments in the scholarly editions used in the Guide are evidently superficial, being limited, primarily, to the insertion of written accents (Old Spanish did not in general make use of them), minor orthographical amendments, the modernization of the punctuation and the reorganization of the textual layout. Cumulatively, though, these changes produce non-negligible differences between the edited versions and the direct transcriptions of the manuscripts. In particular, modernizing the punctuation quite often requires the editor to close off interpretative possibilities left open by the original punctuation, which is typically both less systematic than its modern counterpart and driven by partially different factors (e.g. prosody and topic-hood rather than informational transparency). Perhaps the thinking here was that the illustrative or pedagogical value of the Guide’s anthology might be reduced, particularly for the non-specialist reader, if the texts were presented as semi-paleographic transcriptions rather than in the more easily digestible format of the scholarly edition. If that was the reasoning, such qualms may be misplaced. What does seem to be true is that linguists who are not specialist Hispanists but happen to look at academic works on Old Spanish are rarely exposed to the true nature of the written medieval language.

Turning to other matters, I notice that the some of the IPA symbols deployed in the Guide are not used to refer to the sounds they are supposed to represent. In principle this is not a serious problem, but it could theoretically lead an unsuspecting reader to take away the wrong idea. For example, when discussing the important late medieval changes in the sibilant system, Dworkin refers (24) to the ‘deaffrication of /ts/, orth. <c >, <ç >, to /ʂ/’. You could hardly fault a reader for inferring from this notation that the change in question delivered a retroflex fricative. What in fact must be meant – unless Dworkin is departing very radically indeed from the standard account – is that the change produced a dentalized type of /s/, which Spanish phonologists normally characterize as being a laminal one (contrasting with the apical /s/ represented in the orthography by s- and -ss-). Ideally, then, one would want this sound to be shown as  using the IPA’s bespoke dental diacritic. It should be borne in mind, though, that the whole debate surrounding the Spanish sibilants and their evolution is beset with ad hoc or otherwise non-standard notation, so the minor irregularity just highlighted is hardly unprecedented. It is also worth observing that almost nothing can be known with certainty about the phonetic reality of the sound which Dworkin represents as /ʂ/, other than that its modern reflex is the dental non-sibilant fricative /θ/. Even the assumption that it was  requires early modern Spanish to have exhibited a cross-linguistically rare phonemic opposition, viz. between a laminal /s/ and an apical one. Basque, suggestively enough given its geographical adjacency, has that contrast in its phonology, but the vigour with which Castilians criticized Andalusians for pronouncing their ss as ç leads one to suspect that the relevant Spanish distinction was rather more salient.

Beyond these already trifling matters, one really has to work hard to find items that are worth recording as debits in the critical ledger. For the content of the Guide is really very good indeed. Dworkin is a consummate scholar of the medieval language and, to judge from this recent offering, he is still operating at the top of his game. Both he and Oxford University Press should be congratulated on an output that will serve students and scholars well for the foreseeable future.