This elegant edition of Alexander Neckham's school text, known from its opening words as Sacerdos ad altare, is a work of painstaking scholarship that bears abundant fruit. Building upon the pioneering studies by C. H. Haskins and Richard Hunt, McDonough confirms Alexander Neckham's authorship of both text and gloss, and dates the composition to c. 1200. The edition is made from the sole surviving manuscript copy, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, ms 385/605, which has been described charitably as the work of ‘an unlearned copyist’. McDonough notes the variety of errors, including inaccurate collation, transcriptional mistakes, errors of omission, unnecessary additions, solecisms and ‘numerous other infelicities’. Watching him make good in a variety of ways many of these scribal shortcomings is a part of the enjoyment of reading this volume. The text of Sacerdos ad altare consists in twenty brief passages written in a high style but treating in a simple way a wide variety of topics from the world of the cleric, broadly understood. The first three chapters discuss the names and uses of clerical vestments, the paraphernalia of the altar, and the ornaments of ‘larger churches’ (for example bells, lamps, lecterns, etc). These are followed by similarly brief but informative chapters on the offices and buildings of the monastery, the king and his retainers, entertainments of the royal court, marvels and spectacles of the court, a general reading list for students (De eruditione scolarium), as well as specific texts for the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic and music, geometry, astronomy, canon and civil law, and the Old and New Testaments. The last two chapters discuss the needs of a scribe (De notario), and the skills needed by ‘librarians’ (librarii), i.e. those who make and copy books. Each of these short descriptive passages is followed by a set of glosses, written in a smaller and highly abbreviated hand. In the first chapters nearly every word of the main text receives a gloss and the twenty or twenty-five lines of text (in the printed edition) are followed by as many as 1,350 lines of gloss (see ch. iii). The frequency and detail of the glosses abates as the work proceeds. The glosses are quite varied and often make unexpected observations. Some discuss grammatical and orthographical niceties, such as the list of thirty-odd words that have no singular number (p. 179). Some draw attention to lexical pitfalls, such as the difference between a ‘magnate’ [magnus] and a ‘magnet’ [magnes] (p. 133) or the two meanings of ius, the legal and the culinary (p. 207). And some discuss the things themselves; for example we learn, as every student should, the difference between a burro, the offspring of a male horse and a female donkey, and a mule, the offspring of a female horse and a male donkey (p. 171). The sources of all this learning are carefully chronicled in a full and informative apparatus fontium.