Handsomely produced, this volume contains an insightful introduction and ten essays by students and friends of Glenn Olsen. The book is a fitting tribute to an excellent scholar and a fine person. The introduction attempts two tasks. First, it reviews Olsen's scholarship from the late 1960s to the present and second it tries to align the contributions with Olsen's own interests. The editors acquit themselves of both tasks effectively, but more successfully with the former than with the latter. Olsen is a medievalist without portfolio. He has worked across the whole period. He is sometimes an intellectual historian, sometimes a religious historian, sometimes a social historian. But he has always tried to situate his medieval interests within the total stream of Western history. He has looked back to what the Middle Ages owed to the early Christian and Patristic periods, and he has explored connections between the medieval and the modern worlds. Except for Francis Oakley, I cannot think of another medievalist with Olsen's range. The editors do not mention Oakley (and that is not a criticism), but they do a fine job of showing the range and also the coherence of Olsen's oeuvre. The essays in the volume, and this is always the problem with a Festschrift, do not quite align with Olsen or with each other. But the book has some very good essays nonetheless.

Three essays treat the Carolingian period. Carol Neel discusses Dhuoda's exegesis of Acts 4: 32–34—especially the part about “one heart and one soul”—and argues that in her Handbook for William, Dhuoda expressed a lay and maternal view different from the prevalent male and hierarchical view. She also argues that Dhuoda claimed the authority to teach her son. Her arguments will not persuade all readers. Paul Dutton uses Einhard's Translation of Marcellinus and Peter to demonstrate the author's pivot from court to cloister. He argues, further, that Einhard's authority was repeatedly challenged until he stopped speaking for the court and began speaking for the saints: a very interesting reading of this well-known text. Martha Rampton delves into the sources pertaining to the attempt by Lothar II to divorce his wife, Theutberga, in order to marry his long-time lover, Waldrada. For that is what Rampton sees: a discourse of romantic love amid political and dynastic concerns. Careful attention to the sources finds authentic evidence of emotions, she believes.

Three essays explore aspects of the monastic ethos. Giles Constable reflects on the tropes of the desert and solitude and calls the monastery a “surrogate wilderness” (147). He goes on to consider poverty, silence, and apathy as acts of emptying the self, embracing solitude, and seeking wisdom. David Appleby and Teresa Olsen Pierre make two interesting points about Bernard of Clairvaux. The first is that they observe him changing his mind over the course of about two decades. About what? Initially he believed that monastic humility called for downcast eyes; an upward glance might lead to curiositas. Later he thought that upright stature was a reminder of man's created beauty. The second is that the human body might thus have a role in revealing the glory of God. Alberto Ferriero investigates a sermon of Vincent Ferrer (who was, of course, a Dominican friar and not a monk) concerning the imitatio Christi. Such imitation could be a literal embodiment of the life of Christ. Vincent contributed to the idea that the fleshly, corporeal world has a role to play in the achievement of salvation.

The volume's other essays march off in rather different directions—from the others and from each other. James Muldoon tackles the stadial theory of historical development as it pertains to Ireland. He asks why it is that in all of Europe, only in Ireland did Christianization not produce agriculturalists and town-dwellers. In the end, he says, the question is wrongly put and the theory is flawed. One should not “expect” specific historical outcomes (54). Bernard F. Reilly tries to make sense of the complex and composite Chronica Adefonsi that is potentially a valuable source for the reign of Alfonso VII of Léon-Castille (1126–1157). The work, surviving only in sixteenth-century paper manuscripts, had at least three different authors (or compilers?) who knew and cared about different things. James Brundage, in what I predict will be the most frequently cited essay in the book, argues for the “juridification” of classical canon law in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Canonists began to stress the Roman and civil over the theological roots of the church's law. Canon lawyers received more and more lucrative positions. Critics charged that, unlike theology, which was stable, the law was changing all the time as new opinions were issued. The result of the shift was momentous. For most of the last millennium, key churchmen have spoken more like lawyers than like theologians. Frank Coppa tells the utterly fascinating story of Virginia Oldoini, the contessa di Castiglione. She was the agent of Camillo di Cavour to Napoléon III tasked with winning France to the cause of Italian unification. Bedding the emperor and some other key French officials made the contessa controversial and even embarrassing. History has largely and unfairly ignored her.