Amongst all the royal saints of Anglo-Saxon fame none achieved a greater posthumous celebrity than Edmund, the king of the East Angles killed in 869 and Edward ‘the Confessor’, king of England, who died some two hundred years later. While the former's cult was primarily regional and centred on the great abbey of Bury St Edmunds, the latter's was national and royal, focused on the dynastic abbey of Westminster. Edward the Confessor has long been subject to historians' attention, Edmund less so, and both collections of essays under review are to be welcomed. They differ substantially in emphasis: the Edmund collection is avowedly not concerned with the historical Edmund but rather with later constructions, reconfigurations and uses of his life and cult; the volume on Edward concentrates on the king and his political world. The single essay on the development of the cult and the canonisation of 1161 indeed fits rather uneasily within the collection.

In his introductory essay to the latter volume Richard Mortimer provides a lengthy and characteristically nuanced account of the contemporary and near-contemporary sources, and an assessment of the reign, before examining the later emergence of the ‘legendary’ king. But the wonder-working and healing king of later hagiography is already apparent, as van Houts stresses, in the Vita Edwardi: she plausibly suggests that John of Ravenna, abbot of Fécamp, was responsible for developing this topos. Two essays examine Edward's early years, his family and his wife, Edith. Keynes who many years ago shed valuable light on Edward's life in Normandy before his accession now turns his attention to the young Edward, the Æetheling and heir of his father, Æthelred, while Stafford recapitulates many of her earlier conclusions in a study of Edith. But perhaps the most important contribution here is Baxter's lengthy and compelling reassessment of the question of the succession to the throne following Edward's death. Combining a detailed examination of charter and Domesday Book evidence with a close analysis of the sources and their reliability he argues that in the shifting politics of the reign the succession policy shifted too. This collection also includes three short essays on the eleventh-century building of Westminster Abbey by a triumvirate of architectural historians whose understanding of the structure is unrivalled. Fernie stresses its novelty and unparalleled scale in late Anglo-Saxon England, and its careful planning according to strict geometric canons which make it an architectural prototype on both sides of the Channel. Rodwell outlines recent archaeological discoveries not only of the building, but also its decoration, while Gem's succinct account of the men involved in the building project sheds new light on a little-studied aspect of royal administration. This volume is a most valuable contribution to the crowded historiography of the crucial years before the Conquest.

Edmund was above all an East Anglian saint, whose regional popularity both testified to a sense of community and contributed to it, as Pinner demonstrates in her analysis of surviving images of the saint in East Anglian churches, while Colton shows how the liturgical presentation of the saint in words and music at Bury St Edmunds reinforced the monastic community's identity, and perhaps that of the urban laity too. At about the same time Lydgate, himself a Bury monk, produced his Lives of Sts Edmund and Fremund, a poem commissioned by his abbot to celebrate Henry vi's visit to the abbey: here, as Edwards suggests, the monastic and secular, regional and national, political and pious inter-connected. For the cult of Edmund spread way beyond eastern England, as two studies here, far apart in place and chronology, reveal. Lydgate situated one of Edmund's miracles in London. This is highly localised and Bale's analysis suggests that it was intended both to appeal to the city's laity, extending Edmund's and Bury's reach in the capital, while the topographical precision of the miracle links it closely to the Lancastrian regime, the earl of Suffolk in particular, and national politics. But an even more extraordinary reinterpretation of the royal martyr is found in twelfth-century Iceland where, as Finlay shows, Ari þorgilsson in his Íslendingabók appropriated the story of the king killed by pagan Vikings into a newly Christianised Viking and Scandinavian culture (paralleled and probably influenced by the English Danes' adoption of Edmund as a saintly patron), and later medieval Icelandic genealogical traditions ascribed aristocratic descent from the virginal saint. But the process of hagiographic reconstruction began almost immediately after the first vita, written by Abbo of Fleury, appeared, when Aelfric of Eynsham in his collection of saints' Lives discussed by Phelpstead presented a saint who was certainly to be admired for his virginity, but who above all was a royal martyr, one appropriate to the educated lay elite who were as much Aelfric's intended audience as were the monks. In the same way, as Hayward argues, Geoffrey of Wells's Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi, written under Bury's patronage in the twelfth century, aligned the saint with contemporary and recent political concerns about royal successions and how claims to the throne might be resolved.