Felice Lifshitz was one of the first medievalists to embrace memory studies, approaching narratives written in the Middle Ages not to learn simply what happened but to understand how authors intended the events they described to be understood. The past was malleable, and authors writing about their past were making points for their contemporaries. Lifshitz's interests range widely, chronologically, from the seventh century to the eleventh, but she keeps her focus on the ancient Frankish kingdom of Neustria, the area (roughly) that became Normandy. Here, she combines an analysis of two genres that are often treated separately: historiography, that is a recounting by medieval authors of political events, and hagiography, the lives and miracles of the saints.

The volume is a collection of eighteen articles, including two new ones, though most were originally published in the 1990s. The different articles work together well and are organized under five main topics: hagiography as historical narrative, sanctity as used by the archbishops of Rouen, the movement of relics out of Neustria, the medieval writer Dudo of St.-Quentin, and women and gender. Although the Variorum series has long provided an excellent opportunity for making articles (often published in obscure journals) readily available, it was always awkward that the articles were just photographically reproduced. Recently, however, the articles have been typeset anew, making the volumes more readable and easier to cite. Liftshitz says that she was able to correct typos and faulty citations in getting the pieces ready for press, although she resisted the effort to update the works cited or recast any arguments. Several of the articles were originally published in French, but they appear here in English. There is a list in the back of manuscripts consulted, in some two dozen archives and libraries in four countries, but no bibliography (there is an index but it does not include works cited). Overall, this is a valuable resource for those interested in the uses of sanctity or in early medieval Normandy, and it is a book to recommend to a research library.

The second section, on the bishops of and sanctity in Rouen, is both the largest and the most significant. It is quintessential Lifshitz, delving into saints’ lives, analyzing when and for what purpose they would have been written, focusing on early manuscripts, pointing out problems with faulty nineteenth-century editions, and disagreeing with other scholars. Here, for example, we learn about the privilege that, it was claimed, was given to the archbishop of Rouen in the seventh century to free one prisoner a year but was apparently really created in the thirteenth century in reaction to the French royal takeover of Normandy. She addresses the question of whether the Gesta of the archbishops of Rouen was written in the cathedral or in the nearby monastery of St.-Ouen (concluding for the latter); discusses why and how some of Rouen's archbishops were declared to be saints; locates the beginning of the cult of Saint Romanus of Rouen in the tenth century, when it was used to counter Normans who were considered half-pagan; recounts the eleventh-century rivalry between St.-Ouen and the cathedral over who was the true heir of the sainted bishop Ouen; and connects the rise of the veneration of early bishops of Rouen to the arrival of the Norsemen in what became Normandy. Many of the ideas in these articles were developed further in Lifshitz's The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995), an important book that is now out of print and undeservedly little known.

Liftshitz uses some of these same approaches in the articles in the fourth section, on Dudo of St.-Quentin, who was persuaded at the end of the tenth century to write the (supposedly) glorious history of the Norse settlers in Neustria, especially the men who became counts (or dukes) of Normandy. His Gesta normannorum in many ways paralleled contemporary Gesta composed about series of bishops or abbots. Lifshitz here productively uses the lens of memory studies, especially the medieval construction of a useful past, to analyze a tenth-century chronicler in the same way as she analyzes contemporary hagiographers. In addition, she includes here an article on so-called feudal language in Dudo's work, arguing cogently that one should not read a twelfth-century understanding of fiefs and fidelity back in time two centuries. This section also includes, somewhat oddly, a very brief encyclopedia entry on Dudo and an introduction to Lifshitz's online translation of his Gesta, neither of which seems necessary in this context.

The second and fourth sections of this volume, thus, are both the longest and contain the most of continuing interest. The other sections contain articles that are worthwhile but are not as novel as when first published. The volume begins with an impassioned plea for seeing hagiography as an important historical source, an argument that has pretty well won the day during the last twenty-five or thirty years, although Lifshitz felt compelled to add a long, semi-autobiographical discussion of her growing conviction that the very category “hagiography” is unhelpful. The articles in the third section, on how and why Normandy's relics (and even origin stories) ended up elsewhere are intriguing but very narrow and technical. In contrast, the two articles in the final section, labeled as “Women and Gender,” are the lightest weight, being more on women than on gender. They consist of a brief discussion of Emma of Normandy's Encomium and a new article detailing the women who appeared in Dudo's work.

Although the high price will probably reduce the book's sales to individual scholars, it is good to have all the articles together for easy reference. Lifshitz is an excellent and insightful historian, and her work deserves to be more widely known and cited.