In comparison to his namesake and contemporary, Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Laon is an understudied figure; and yet he was very highly regarded in his own day as an ecclesiastical administrator, peacemaker and (by all except Peter Abelard) teacher. He is now best known for having taught the Bible by means of glossed texts, a practice that led to the production of the influential and comprehensive biblical commentary later known as the Glossa ordinaria. But Anselm is also associated with a collection of sententiae or ‘sentences' – pithy statements on theological subjects, drawn from the Fathers, which reached their zenith in the 1150s collection made by Peter Lombard. In the 1950s Odon Lottin produced editions of some earlier sentences collections, including those of Anselm and/or his school, but they remain enigmatic monuments to those early twelfth-century classrooms and teachers. Cédric Giraud's massive study is an attempt to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of Anselm by investigating the collection and influence of his sentences (determinedly avoiding the Glossa). Giraud first assembles what can be known of Anselm's biography, and asks what gave such a teacher of Scripture authority; he follows with a consideration of how the sentences might have been assembled, at this period on the cusp between oral and written teaching; and finally, he examines the afterlife of the sentences and their place in creating de Ghellinck's ‘mouvement théologique’ in the twelfth century. For Giraud, Anselm and his school was the birthplace of the magisterium of theologians in the Middle Ages. Sentences are, as Giraud notes more than once, difficult source material. There are lots of them, but they often survive in disordered, undated, anonymous collections; some manuscripts have overlapping groups of material, but others have unique scraps. Editing such stuff is ungrateful work, with unplaceable origins and unattributable sources. Where we do have editions, the sentences themselves can be hard to place: some seem trivial; others, part of a broader discussion whose outlines have been lost to us. How they were used inside or outside the classroom remains conjectural. Giraud is to be commended simply for embarking on the task at all. His book provides a counterweight to Anselm's reputation as a biblical commentator, a reminder that he was known as more than an expositor of Scripture. More important, it highlights the modern scholarly dichotomy of Bible and theology in the twelfth century as false. It is only unfortunate that the book itself is so vast. Even the specialist reviewer is unnerved by a total of 631 pages; less determined readers may not even begin. For all its interest, the book would have benefitted from an editor. Far from losing its force, its argument would be better made in a tighter form.