Kai Peter Hilchenbach's study of the fourth book of the Histories of Gregory of Tours is the publication of a dissertation that the author defended in 2004 at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. In two parts, it comprises a new edition, together with a linguistic, text-critical and historical commentary on this book. The first part (203 pages), written entirely in Latin, consists of the new edition together with a preface, in which Hilchenbach offers a comprehensive investigation and re-evaluation of the complicated and extraordinarily manifold manuscript transmission of the Histories together with a new stemma codicum for his reconstruction of the text. In comparison with the conclusions of the latest editon, that by Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison (published between 1937 and 1951), Hilchenbach reconstructs a more complex stemma codicum with two hyperarchetypi (α and φ) which he assumes to have been written shortly after the archetype began to circulate in Gaul around 600. In his demonstration of how different manuscripts of these hyperarchetypi were used to produce new versions of Gregory's Histories, Hilchenbach proves that we have to imagine an even richer and more varied transmission of Gregory's Histories than that already reconstructed by Krusch and Levison. In this respect the study affirms the findings of Martin Heinzelmann and Pascal Bourgain, both of whom published important contributions on Gregory's Histories and their transmission in the last two decades. One wishes, however, that Hilchenbach had connected his insights more thoroughly to Heinzelmann's and Bourgain's results. The second part of Hilchenbach's work, written in German, presents an excellent and very useful linguistic and text-critical commentary which, as the author makes clear, should not replace Max Bonnet's great study (Le Latin de Gregoire de Tours, Paris 1890) but rather complement it. Building upon the triage of the manuscript transmission of the Histories in the first part, Hilchenbach uses his detailed linguistic commentary to show that Gregory's Latin was by no means the ‘barbarous’ Latin which Bruno Krusch had imagined, reconstructed and eventually published in his edition. Instead, Hilchenbach demonstrates that Gregory actually wrote a ‘relativ gepflegtes literarisches Latein der Spätantike’ (‘relatively cultivated literary Latin of the late ancient period’, p. 613). The linguistic and text-critical commentary is then followed by a historical commentary (pp. 475–611). Though this last section might have been intended to help orient readers in the historical narrative of the fourth book, the study in its present form is clearly directed at experts on Merovingian history. To fully appreciate the work, one should already have specific questions in mind, be it regarding the accounts of Gregory in his fourth book or the text and transmission of the Histories; in addition one should also be able to complement the highly selective bibliography. For these elect, however, Hilchenbach's investigation of the fourth book of the Histories is a very useful study with important implications for the whole text of the Histories and its transmission; it would have been even more useful if the second part had been made accessible through indices.