The book edited by D. Kempf and M. G. Bull represents the first modern critical edition of the chronicle of Robert the Monk (after the edition in the Recueil des historiens des croisades, 1866), which is preserved in eighty-four manuscripts: that is, many more than in the case of any other chronicle of the First Crusade. However, as the editors rightly remark, this source has not received much attention from historians. This chronicle, dated to about 1110, is one of those which are based on the anonymous Gesta Francorum written a few years after the First Crusade. Attention in the introduction is concentrated on the identification of the author and assessing the date of the chronicle, as well as considering the manuscript tradition. Much attention is given to determining whether it is correct to identify Robert as archbishop of Reims, as is usually done (this assumption was contested recently by C. Sweetenham in the translation of Robert's chronicle). We actually do not possess the autograph of Robert's text, and the oldest manuscript can allegedly be dated to the 1140s/1150s. This (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, lat. 5129) was chosen as the base manuscript for this edition (p. lviii), the same as in the case of the Recueil. At the same time, while the Recueil edition has an apparatus criticus based mostly on the manuscripts preserved in France, this edition has no apparatus criticus, and only some clearly mistaken readings in the Latin text are amended by reference to other manuscripts (I calculated seventy-one amendments, mostly non-orthographical) (pp. lvi–lvii). The editors justify this way of editing by referring to the ‘noteworthy stability of the propositional content of the text’ (p. li). That is to say, the present edition contains the same text as the previous one. It should be noted however that this is the first to include a full list of manuscripts, and thus we can see their geographical distribution. There is an interesting suggestion (pp. xliv–xlvi) that fast and widespread dissemination of the text in Germany in the middle and second half of the twelfth century was favoured by German participation in the second and third crusades. In this case it is to be regretted that the edition does not contain a stemma analysis, since, among other things, it could help us to have a clearer idea about how many manuscripts were in imperial lands at that time. The editors note that the number of copies of the chronicle decreases considerably after the twelfth century, but that it regains favour in the fifteenth, almost exclusively in Germany. That, it is suggested, is probably a consequence of interest generated by the Ottoman threat to central Europe (pp. xlvii); that could be true. Furthermore, there were several translations of the chronicle into High German at that time. Actually, the list of manuscripts demonstrates that thirty-two manuscripts are clearly of the twelfth century, only nine of the thirteenth, five of the fourteenth and twenty-eight of the fifteenth, mostly preserved in Germany and Austria. It may also be worth noting that, as I have discovered, we have a similar situation with the manuscript tradition of Humbert of Romans's treatise De predicatione crucis, originally destined for crusading in Palestine. Furthermore, as it is possible to see in catalogue records of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library that the Codex S. Petri b. IX 28 from Salzburg, which contains Robert's chronicle, includes some historical and liturgical materials concerning the Ottomans and the Hussites as well: the later use of the chronicle by Robert the Monk would probably be a good subject for further scholarship.