The Syriac Chronicle of 1234 should be more widely known. Composed in the middle of the thirteenth century by an otherwise unknown cleric, it is a world chronicle distilling knowledge of the Ancient Near East (not exclusively through the Old Testament), the classical Greek and Roman worlds, Late Antiquity, the early Islamic and high caliphal periods, and especially the confusing period of Turkic and Crusader conquests, warfare, and rule in the Middle East. The connection to Edessa (clearly present though not known in detail) makes the text particularly fruitful for Crusade historians, Armenologists, and Syriacists. Yet the work is poorly studied, in part because, apart from a full but almost inaccessible translation into French, only partial translations exist, and even those are tucked away in obscure publications. Studies that do cite this chronicle have typically pillaged it very selectively for specific extractive purposes without engaging the work as a whole, the author's method, or how scholars might responsibly utilize this text. Hilkens does a great service to historians of Christianity not only by calling our attention to this important but under-utilized resource but also by providing a study of the sources used by the anonymous chronicler that will help scholars use the text more competently. While medieval world histories are most commonly prized by historians for new material that is not dependent upon earlier sources, the Chronicle of 1234 partially incorporates several now-lost texts from earlier periods, some of which are here described and partially reconstructed by Hilkens for the first time.

Three brief introductions situate respectively the historical context of Christianity in Edessa, the edition and translation history of the text, and the limited scholarship on this chronicle. The first chapter discusses the chronicle's author, genre, structure, metanarrative, chronology, and method for using sources. Twenty-three successive chapters are devoted each to an individual source for material in the Chronicle of 1234, although it varies whether sources used only indirectly by the anonymous chronicler (by means of an intermediary source) received their own chapter or are only dealt with in the chapter of the mediating text, or—in some cases of poorly defined source material—grouped together into a class of sources. Almost half the chapters (chapters 7–17) address late antique sources, from Eusebius of Caesarea to the rise of Islam. Particularly interesting to historians of late antiquity will be a chapter toward reconstructing the lost sixth-century world chronicle of Andronicus. Scholars of the medieval reception of the Bible and other ancient texts (including 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Josephus, and Hippolytus of Rome) will find useful discussions of medieval reconstructions of ancient chronology and traditions—not only in the Chronicle of 1234 but also in Michael the Syrian's Chronicle. For Islamicists and historians of Christianity in the early Islamic period, there are only chapters on Jacob of Edessa (half a page), Dionysios of Tell-Maḥrē (13 pages), and an undifferentiated chapter on “Arabic sources” (11 pages). Hilkens explains the methodological challenges of identifying separate sources by individual authors writing in Arabic (281, 287), yet it seems to this reviewer that there is room for more research here; for example, Hilkens raises the possibility that the Chronicle of 1234 may have used Theophilos of Edessa's work directly (276, 286) but does not adjudicate the question. Of the chronicler's more recent sources, chapters on an unknown early medieval Greek source and Ignatius III of Melitene will be particularly useful for Byzantinists, and a chapter on Basil of Edessa will interest Crusade historians. Michael the Syrian does not get a separate chapter but is cited for comparanda throughout.

This is a slightly revised publication of Hilkens's 2014 Ph.D. dissertation. It would have been helped by a fuller index and a compiled bibliography of works cited. This book could have engaged with Muriel Debié's recent magnum opus on Syriac historiography (L'écriture de l'histoire en syriaque: transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellenisme et islam [Peeters, 2015]), which is now essential reading for the topic. Hilkens could also have made greater use of Maria Conterno's La “descrizione dei tempi” dall'alba dell'espansione islamica (De Gruyter, 2014), which I found cited only in passing in a couple footnotes. Hilkens's list of partial translations should add the portion translated into English by A. S. Tritton and H. A. R. Gibb (“The First and Second Crusades from an Anonymous Syriac Chronicle,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1933): 69–101 and 273–305), which he cites later in the book. The historical introduction may be profitably supplemented by other overviews, but it is not the volume's main contribution.

The author rightly notes that more work remains to be done clarifying the relationships among the extant and lost historical sources, but I would also suggest additional avenues for future research. The intersections between medieval Islamic and Christian historical writing is a developing field with much more work to be done, especially including Armenian and Syriac sources, which have attracted less attention from Byzantinists. But even beyond source criticism, the interactions documented and hypothesized here suggest rich potential for the study of manuscript culture in the medieval Middle East, as books and texts changed hands and moved. This book provides a glimpse into the breadth of the intellectual culture of Syriac Christians, and the intellectual history of medieval non-European Christianity deserves more attention, not least for its potential to diversify our understanding of Christian-Muslim relations. And most broadly, a cultural history which takes seriously the elements shared across religious boundaries is necessary to situate medieval historiography like this in its own context, rather than assigning it exclusively to Church History, and necessarily to that field's sparsely populated remote archipelagoes concerned with non-Latin and non-Greek branches of medieval Christianity. This volume is an insightful and fruitful starting point in that direction.