Jocelin of Furness, who died in the second decade of the thirteenth century, was a monk of the Cistercian abbey at Furness in the historic county of Lancashire. He was the certain author of the Lives of four saints: St Patrick, St Helen, St Kentigern and St Waldef (or Waltheof). Understanding of the context in which Jocelin composed the four saints' Lives which can securely be attributed to his authorship has been significantly facilitated by Helen Birkett's substantial and impressive study. The thorough and competent scholarship which guides the reader through questions of composition, patronage, audience and contemporary context reflects the academic stable at York under the patronage of which this monograph is published, and in which the author has received her training. All this is duly and fulsomely acknowledged in the preface. Birkett freely admits in her conclusion, however, that much work remains to be done – and this reviewer is himself acutely conscious of the task – on the textual aspects of the Lives, in identifying scriptural and classical references and parallels, and in understanding the manuscript tradition. A pressing case is Vita sancti Walleui abbatis de Melros, the Life of St Waldef, abbot of Melrose. Waldef was a stepson of David i, king of Scots, and so an uncle to King William the Lion, to whom the Life is dedicated. The text of the Vita sancti Walleui is extant in one manuscript, executed at Dunfermline in the fifteenth century, which has found its way to the library of the Royal Palace in Madrid: an edition has yet to be published. The text printed in the eighteenth century by the Bollandists in Acta Sanctorum derives from a transcription now lost. Although she had access to the Madrid manuscript, and bases her analysis of the Life on it, Birkett has chosen to give quotations from the Bollandists' text. In most of the passages that she quotes this makes little difference; but it does mean that we miss, for example, the play that Jocelin (or the monks of Melrose themselves) made with the name of their cellarer. Having pointed out the joke that St Waldef's horse was known as ‘Brother Ferrandus’, Birkett misses the Madrid manuscript's evidence that the cellarer of Melrose was called not ‘Thomas’ (as the Acta Sanctorum text gives us), but Tina, ‘the wine barrel’. In this book of over 300 pages, it ought nevertheless to be said, Birkett has done enough to satisfy the exacting reader, and it would be unfair to expect more than the capable author has provided. Birkett's study is a work to be commended on its own terms both for its valuable analysis and as a practical resource; it should be read by all students of medieval hagiography.