Despite – or maybe precisely because of – the second word of its title, this is a work which is of central importance to readers of JFLS. It is a strikingly intelligent and readable treatment of Romance linguistics from a predominantly, though not exclusively French perspective, by an author who is a product of the German comparatist tradition and who has published authoritative work on French, Italian, Occitan and Spanish. The book is aimed at both student and specialist and is thus pedagogically and intellectually well focused. It would be an ideal textbook for an undergraduate course in Romance linguistics and it is also a superb survey of the state of the discipline. The range is inevitably substantial, from Late Latin and early texts to XML encoding and corpus linguistics. This means conciseness, but has not led to over-compression: the author has managed to find space to include different perspectives and to show (as well as the most recent consensus on major issues) the development of the discipline. Thus, for example, an excellent section on historical semantics (232–256) presents, in compact and lucid form a range of analytical models which are not always accessible to students in their original German (Blank, Heger, Raible, Lebsanft/Gleßgen [missing from the bibliography]). This is as cogent a survey of this often daunting area as I have read.

But Gleßgen's book is far more than a manual – a term which tends to lead the reader to expect a dutiful but cautious ‘state of the nation’ approach: it is an exciting, often passionate introduction to the subject, which (unusually) devotes space to ‘la linguistique devant la langue et la société’ (28–31) and to an epilogue: ‘à quoi sert la linguistique (historique)?’ (450–452), the latter as the conclusion to a whole chapter (425–452) devoted to the historiography of Romance linguistics. The book contains any number of diagrams, tables and examples which make it a superb textbook for the teacher as well as for the student, but perhaps more importantly, it conveys a sense of what is not known, and thus why Romance linguistics remains intellectually exciting. It is a triumph of pedagogy and scholarship and one of the things it demonstrates is that the two are inseparable. Gleßgen is convinced that Romance linguistics makes no sense unless it is either comparative, or diachronic, or both. UK French linguistics sometimes loses sight of that, and this fine book will go some way to explaining why to do so is a mistake. The volume is completed by a thorough ten-page bibliography, and by an invaluable seven-page ‘index des notions’.