Contained within the surviving manuscripts of the Middle Ages are a diverse collection of instructions, procedures and rituals intended to enable the users of those manuscripts to affect the outcome of events through supernatural means. For many modern readers of those same manuscripts, it has made sense to distinguish among this variety of texts, and to classify some of them as liturgical rites, prayers or blessings, while labelling others as magical ‘charms’. The question of just how meaningful such distinctions are lies at the heart of Ciaran Arthur's book, which focuses specifically on the corpus of material from Anglo-Saxon England. He emphasises the fact that many so-called ‘charms’ are in fact intended for use in the same sorts of circumstances as are ‘liturgies’, and that Anglo-Saxon scribes sometimes placed them side-by-side on the same manuscript pages without apparent discrimination. These considerations lead Arthur to conclude that ‘there is no reason to think that contemporaries would have … distinguished them from other rituals which developed from mainstream liturgical practices’ (p. 165), and therefore that ‘it is better to consider “charms” as liturgical texts that are part of an innovative, experimental and diverse ecclesiastical culture’ (p. 133). Throughout his study, Arthur consistently sets these views against those held in ‘traditional scholarship’, by which he chiefly means the various nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editors who first collected corpora of texts which they considered to be representative of ‘Anglo-Saxon magic’. Although Arthur is right to remind us of the distorting effects of such collections, which often pulled individual texts out of their historical and manuscript contexts in ways that can give a misleading sense of their nature and origins, one sometimes wonders whether those old views still hold sway to the extent that Arthur suggests (esp. pp. 8–12). Readers familiar with more recent scholarship, which has already gone some way towards problematising old distinctions between ‘charms’ and ‘liturgy’, may already feel predisposed to agree with Arthur that it is productive to look for connections between and among the individual strands of the Anglo-Saxons’ religious culture. Arthur himself offers several suggestions of ways in which the interests, goals or methods of so-called ‘charms’ might intersect with those of ‘mainstream Christian texts’, highlighting in particular instances in which he detects ‘thematic and textual similarities between “charms” and liturgical texts’ (p. 103). It is fair to say that some of the suggested ‘similarities’ go further than others, and there are certainly occasions when the pursuit of parallels in biblical or liturgical sources risks becoming forced (can it really be said that a ritual which requires a woman to step over her husband in bed exhibits ‘a close parallel’ to the biblical story of Elisha lying upon the body of a dead boy, as suggested on pp. 114–17?). But in its determination to reconstruct the meaning of so-called ‘charms’ to the people who used, copied and retained them, this study reminds scholars about the continuing need to make fresh connections in their interpretation of these fascinating texts.