Middle English Lives of Christ, of which Ian Johnson identifies twenty-four, are by any standard a major witness to devotional life in late medieval England. This makes them a critical focus for modern research, whether one is, like Johnson, energised by their evidential power or, like many other scholars, inclined to put them in the ‘important but boring’ category which resists (or anyway repels) intellectual engagement. In recent scholarship, the Lives have generally had a lukewarm press, in spite of such significant work as Michael Sargent's edition of Nicholas Love's Mirror and the Geographies of orthodoxy project, co-piloted by Johnson himself. They have been thought to lack technical as well as iconographic interest, and to fade in historical terms into a homogenous landscape of Christocentric devotion. Indeed, the academic climate has tended to frigidity in the view that, supported by clerical diktat, Love's Mirror stifled under a passive bulk of a lusher, essentially self-regulating vernacular literature. In other words, Lives of Christ have acquired for many the status of the ‘myopic dead-centre’ which Michael Camille once opposed to the vigour of the margins. Johnson is unabashedly sceptical about all of this. His agenda is to rehabilitate the Lives by demonstrating their technical and historical interest. The subject of translation is primary here, for the obvious reason that the main texts are themselves translations. But translation was not, as Johnson explains, a simple matter in either execution or consumption. It entailed grave responsibilities, knowledge of much more than the base text and ability to empathise with the varied requirements of readers. Moreover, translation into Middle English was not, as many have seen it, a matter of ‘Latin-vernacular competition and displacement’ (p. 37), but rather a complementary process roundly beneficial to religion. It was also rooted in a theory of its own operation, detectable, for example, in the ‘scholarly technicalities of excision, transposition, rephrasing and insertion’ (p. 64). The detail of Johnson's argument is largely devoted to clarifying this relationship between translation and late medieval devotional intelligence, and showing how it produced subtle and useful texts. He sets the subject up by explaining – disarmingly to this reviewer's mind, and certainly not without humour – both the anachronism of the premises of much recent academic criticism and the intrinsic value of the Lives for medieval readers. Of course, the critique of scholarship is necessary to make the main subject seem worthwhile, but it is more than simple deck-clearance: it embodies an approach to Middle English texts which prioritises historical value over what Johnson considers academic ‘cults’ (p. 30). The heavy work of buttressing the arguments is naturally achieved by case studies; a number of shorter ones in chapter ii, and extended studies in chapters iii and iv of Love's Mirror and the Speculum devotorum, both Pseudo-Bonaventuran texts charitably produced by Carthusians in the first half of the fifteenth century to feed the hunger of non-Latinate readers. These were chosen for their richness (the close readings are clever and revealing), and also because they suggest paths for future research. Such seeding is an aspect of all good scholarship, and a further reason to recommend this clear-headed, important book.