The Chronicle by the shadowy figure known as ‘Fredegar’ is one of the most important and difficult sources for Frankish history. Written at some point in the last decades of the seventh century or (less likely) the early years of the eighth, it is our only solid bridge across the historiographical void that separates Gregory of Tours (d. 594) from the anonymous Liber historiae francorum (c. 726/7), and was widely copied in the Carolingian period. But, as Roger Collins argues in this precise and important book, the draw of the Chronicle's unique window onto the seventh century means that it remains less than fully understood as a complete work. Much of the work is stitched together from epitomised versions of earlier authorities (including Eusebius-Jerome, Hydatius and Gregory of Tours), which in aggregate constitute an original narrative. Debate on this material has been focused above all on structure (four books or five?) and authorship (multiple authors or one?). As Collins demonstrates by means of a lucid critical survey of scholarship, the simplest answer – that the seventh-century Chronicle was a single work put together by a single author-compiler – is also the most convincing (though the attribution to ‘Fredegar’ is very late and retained only as a convenience). This makes up the bulk of the first half of the book. In the second Collins seeks to substantiate the proposition that the text generally referred to as Fredegar's Chronicle should in fact be treated as two separate works. Some manuscripts feature later material usually thought of as constituting several consecutive ‘continuations’ of the Chronicle. These are shown by Collins to be most likely the work of no more than two authors, one taking the story up to 751 (the coup of Pippin iii) and the other – probably written sometime around 780 – finishing in 768 (the succession of Charlemagne and Carloman). However, the version of the main Chronicle that accompanies these ‘continuations’ is sufficiently altered (through the omission of some texts and the introduction of others) to constitute, in Collins's view, a completely new work based on the original. This work, named in one manuscript as Historia vel gesta francorum, stresses the historical role of the Franks much more than had ‘Fredegar’, and was probably first conceived in association with the Carolingian takeover of 751. Many of these arguments were trailed by Collins in earlier articles, and in his short English book Fredegar (Aldershot 1996). The discussion found here is much fuller and based on a comprehensive survey of the manuscripts, exhaustive descriptions of which are also provided. Underlying the whole enterprise is a dissatisfaction with the way in which the composite edition of ‘Fredegar’ produced by Bruno Krusch in 1888 influenced subsequent scholarship by flattening out the contours of the text's evolution. One hopes that Collins will in due course replace that edition with a new version of his own.