Lombards held power in northern Italy from 568 to the advent of the Franks and the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’ after 774. Their period has traditionally been seen as one of Germanic culture, barbarian and illiterate. The evidence does not support this assessment; Everett illuminatingly demonstrates that their culture was neither Germanic nor illiterate. Before their arrival, intellectual literacy in northern Italy increasingly came to be the preserve of Christians interested in the Bible rather than of antiquarians interested in the Classics, but the court and the law also operated on an assumption that society could be regulated by written documents, and such documents were expected to be understood. Lombards seem to have been able to read Latin before they came from Pannonia, to judge by the report in the Liber pontificalis that they were initially invited into Italy by letter (no. 63, Pope John iii). The chapter on ‘Language and literacy’ contains a sympathetic exposition of the nature of texts written by early Romance-speakers; rather than dismissing their apparent nonchalance concerning correct orthography and morphology as ‘barbaric’, and thus by implication inexplicable, Everett shows how literacy remained functional and texts remained intelligible in their context. Any linguistic influence of Germanic on their texts, or on their spoken Romance, is largely dismissed, as many words sometimes attributed to the Lombards are shown to have other plausible etymological origins. Concerning King Rothari's law code of 643, Everett assures us that ‘the overwhelming majority of his subjects in Italy spoke only Latin’ (p. 128); the language used there bridges the gap between the norms of writing and contemporary speech, and what we should be struck by is not any revolutionary Germanic irruptions but Latin's ‘astounding continuity’ (p. 133, a perspective derived from Michel Banniard). Charters were read aloud at the time of redaction and when used later in court, and any functional rather than literary composition that contained strict Classical nominal morphology without prepositions would baffle those intended to act on it. There were oral aspects to litigation, but oral and literate procedures complemented each other, and the correct procedures for using them were established in writing. If anyone who needed recourse to the law happened to be illiterate, they could easily find somebody who was not; ‘written law was used because there was a sufficient amount of people who were sufficiently literate to make it work’ (p. 195). There is nothing particularly Lombard about this, for this is all true of Rome as well. The final part of the book consists of discussions of charters, parchment (usually sheep for charters, goat for books), codices at Verona and Bobbio, the resources of the abbey of Nonantola, cursive and minuscule scripts whose calligraphic virtuosity contrasts strangely with their insouciant grammar, and their ‘extraordinarily rich epigraphic culture’ (p. 236), with excellent photographs. If the phrase ‘Dark Age’ has any sense it might apply to the period before the Lombards' arrival, but then ‘Italians under Lombard rule in the seventh and eighth centuries developed further literate traditions’ (p. 319). The case is convincingly made.