For more than nine hundred years historians have been attempting to make sense of the First Crusade. Even before the conclusion of the campaign, participants had begun to write accounts of their experiences, and when news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Western Christendom many more writers added their own layers of interpretation. So great was its fascination that, as Marcus Bull points out, ‘no other event in the Middle Ages stimulated such a large burst of historical writing’ (p. 2). Writing the early Crusades stands as testimony both to the crusade's enduring appeal to historians and to the importance of the surviving corpus of sources for the campaign. Its constituent essays cover a wide range of topics dealing with the event itself, but also with its aftermath and memorialisation. Some of these works concern the way in which the crusade should be defined. Léan Ní Chléirigh, for example, offers an interesting piece, challenging the recently-expressed view that the campaign should not be interpreted as a pilgrimage. Others, such the essays by Peter Frankopan and Luigi Russo, consider the contribution that specific sources can make to our understanding of the campaign (in this case Anna Komnene's history and the group of chronicles held/written in the monastery of Monte Cassino). Many of the essays explore the crusade's impact in Western Europe and its theological contextualisation: a process which continued throughout the medieval period. In an especially thought-provoking piece, Laura Ashe contests aspects of the widely-held notion that the crusade played an important part in the formation of chivalric culture, while Nicholas Paul looks at the process by which chroniclers introduced the motif of the ‘Gates of Jerusalem’ to add new meaning to their narratives of the expedition. William Purkis's essay is also concerned with impact. It looks at the crusade's emerging status as a cultural point of reference, whose memory was harnessed by later writers to add potency and meaning to their own ideas and agendas. Within these articles, themes of authorial intent and the inter-relationships between sources are frequently subjected to scrutiny, but for some this is their primary concern. Steven Biddlecombe, for example, draws attention to the long-neglected chronicle of Baldric of Bourgueil, examining in particular how Baldric's desire for reconciliation with the Eastern Church moulded his narrative of the campaign. Rubenstein unpacks the whole question of the inter-relationships between the chronicles produced by Albert of Aachen and Guibert of Nogent. James Naus, Damien Kempf and Marcus Bull focus on Robert of Monk, exploring how Robert's affiliation with the Capetians influenced his history of the campaign, why his text was such a success in Germany, and the connections between Robert's narrative and that of Gilo of Paris. Carol Sweetenham offers further insight into the formation of crusading narratives, offering specific discussion of the chroniclers' use of anecdotes. Overall, these works plough a series of deep furrows through crusading sources, bringing to light issues such as authorship, biblical exegesis and the process of storytelling. The standard for the most part is very high in a collection that will be a real asset to historians of the crusades and those interested in the formation and development of medieval narrative.