Edited by Martin Brett and David Woodman, this collection of fifteen essays, The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past, represents the proceedings of a conference held in Cambridge in 2011. The majority are very good studies, indeed. Historians dominate the volume, and claims by Brett that the conference, and papers emerging from it, would permit one to “take stock of the present state of scholarship” (1) in this broad and dynamic field are not fully met. It seems that no scholar of Old or Middle English was invited to participate; as a result, this attempt to depict the post-Conquest period holistically is less successful than it might have been. As it is, the hundreds of extant English vernacular texts produced in the twelfth century are elided by this volume (including in the otherwise comprehensive bibliography). There may also be some other agenda here: the editors state their “intention was to ensure that experts in the pre-Conquest period would be able to control exaggerated claims” (1); and they say “In recent years one could point, for instance, to the high claims advanced for the nature and powers of the late Saxon state” (2). To set out with the intention of diminishing or limiting earlier scholarship representing the Anglo-Saxon period is ungenerous. Fortunately, the essays themselves belie the editors' intentions, for the majority are excellent analyses of primary source materials, elucidating the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon past and its textual evidence was overwritten, redeployed, emulated, or problematized by the post-1066 colonizers.

In part one, “The Anglo-Saxon Saints,” Robert Bartlett's wonderfully witty essay engages with a wide range of sources to expertly demonstrate that textual lacunae from the pre-Conquest period were subsequently explained as a result of Danish Viking destruction or English slothfulness. Bartlett stresses Bede's importance, and the ability of the intelligent hagiographer to blend legend, history, and invention. Rosalind Love continues the analysis of saints' lives, focusing on Thorney and Folcard of Saint-Bertin's Life of St. Botwulf to show how thoroughly immersed in a long lineage of saintliness Thorney became through its post-Conquest hagiography. Teresa Webber looks at thirty-one manifestations of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries to show how they were read and how Bede's stamp of authority for his saints was sufficient validation for post-Conquest readers.

Part two, “Anglo-Saxon England in the Narrative of Britain,” contains Julia Barrow's analysis of how post-Conquest authors looked back to Viking depredations as the turning-point in their understanding of Anglo-Saxon history, utilizing the same limited textual sources to create their historical accounts. David Rollason introduces the forthcoming new edition of the complex, multiauthored work that is reflected in Symeon of Durham's Historia de Regibus Anglorum et Dacorum and its precursor and later continuations. He suggests that looking more closely at the link between an institution's cantor and the writing of its history would be worthwhile. In a brief reading of William of Malmesbury's Commentary on Lamentations, R. M. Thomson suggests Malmesbury may eventually have come to be troubled by the Norman Conquest, problematizing our understanding of that author's shifting and often ambivalent perspective. Elisabeth van Houts, in a masterly and detailed discussion of numerous Norman authors in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, reveals how only Orderic Vitalis “campaigned for the Anglo-Saxon heritage to be taken seriously” (140). John Gillingham unravels the complicated, and virtually unknown, annals of Richard of Devizes contained in two early thirteenth-century manuscripts. He proposes that Richard's account of King Arthur and Cerdic's sixth-century political settlement, and his rewriting of the ancestry of Anglo-Saxon King Ecgberht, is an important attempt to clarify complex narratives evinced by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gaimar that is yet “too absurd and too clever” (156) for subsequent readers.

Three essays form part three, “Anglo-Saxon Law and Charter.” A superb essay by Julia Crick tackles the copying of charters in the post-Conquest period that deliberately attempted to emulate earlier script, putting many of the scribes under intense pressure and calling upon the development of skills outside those normally required for copying purposes. In the most unmissable essay in the volume, Nicholas Vincent offers an exceptionally rich and perceptive study that seeks to draw out the importance of both genuine and forged diplomatic evidence in the post-Conquest period. In a wide-ranging analysis of hagiography, regal affiliation, the creation of legendary narrative, and references in charters to pre-Conquest kings (notably Edward the Confessor), Vincent demonstrates the cultural and political shift that occurred during the reign of Henry II and shows that real or forged pre-Conquest charters rarely seemed convincing. Finally, in this section, Bruce O'Brien discusses vernacular lexis and paleographical forms in legal manuscripts to show how varied practices were.

In part four, “Art History and the French Vernacular,” Judith Weiss's short essay looks briefly at romance depictions of the pre-Conquest past to conclude that what survives “fits the twelfth-century historians' view of England and the English before the Conquest: in a mess, in need of discipline and reform, but with the virtue of bravery and some respect for law” (287). Catherine Karkov discusses the Eadwine Psalter by examining its illustrations, concluding. She finds the Psalter's intellectual and cultural significance was built on the community's ideals in the Anglo-Saxon past with a focus on collection and translation, rather than as acting as a memorial. And in an appropriately lengthy tour de force, Malcolm Thurlby evaluates post-Conquest architecture and sculpture. While more images are always desirable, Thurlby provides an excellent overview of the fabric of major cathedrals built in the aftermath of the Conquest, as well as churches, church fonts, tympana, capitals, standing crosses, and more. The scholarly disentanglement of Anglo-Saxon and Norman influences is tricky, since Norman patrons of art and architecture in both building and in manuscript design often showed a preference for an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic.

In sum, this is an important collection of essays, with some outstanding scholarship, though it is a pity that detailed work on the multiple uses of English and French in post-Conquest England was not included.