Susan B. Edgington's translation of Albert of Aachen's Historia represents a major contribution to crusade studies and to medieval historiography generally. For Albert's text is one of the earliest and most detailed treatments to survive of the First Crusade (1095–9), begun perhaps as soon as 1102. Albert, moreover, continues his narrative to the year 1119, making him also a valuable source for the early history of the kingdom of Jerusalem. His battle descriptions are among the most vivid of all the early crusade chronicles, even more so than the better-regarded eyewitness texts of Fulcher of Chartres and the anonymous Gesta francorum. Albert calls attention to a number of crusade participants otherwise unmentioned and to several events (most notably independent expeditions into Armenian cities by Baldwin of Boulogne and Trancred) that other writers leave obscure. His prose, well rendered in Edgington's translation, is straightforward and accessible. At least one prominent medieval thinker, the twelfth-century eastern historian William of Tyre, thought highly enough of Albert to base the opening of his chronicle – the books covering the First Crusade – almost exclusively on his Historia. Despite these manifold virtues, however, Albert's reputation has long suffered among scholars, such that Edgington can speak in her introduction of the need for his ‘rehabilitation’. This disdain stems in part from a lingering preference among crusade specialists for eyewitness testimony, but it grows more directly out of Albert's own presentation of the origins of the crusade. It was, Albert says, the popular preacher Peter the Hermit who invented and promoted the idea of an armed expedition to liberate Jerusalem after a particularly difficult pilgrimage there. Pope Urban ii, usually credited as the genius behind the campaign, thus receives only passing mention. The stakes are by no means small: the difference is one between a largely French expedition carefully organised by the pope, as other chroniclers and most modern scholars would have it, and a multi-ethnic expedition that arose largely due to popular fervour. In order to explain Albert's outlook and his seeming originality, some historians have posited the existence of a now lost ‘Lotharingian chronicle’. Edgington is sceptical of such a source. She does endorse a connection between Albert's work and the vernacular poetry associated with the crusade, particularly the epic Chanson d'Antioche, but is unable to say with certainty which text influenced the other. Edgington's conclusion, that Albert relied, much as he himself states in his introduction, on stories told by returning crusaders seems unlikely, in light of the sheer breadth and scope of his book. The lack of a substantial secondary literature on Albert's work, however, makes it all but impossible to draw firm conclusions on these and other questions. It is to be hoped that Edgington's wonderful new edition will prove the first and most difficult step in filling these gaps.