Maren Clegg Hyer's introduction to this collection of essays sets out its aim: to examine the everyday realities of life in Anglo-Saxon England through its material culture, defined here as ‘the aspect of human life that centres on the creation and use of objects’. The respective challenges posed by the range of source materials and the desirability of integrating textual and illustrative sources with the evidence of artefacts and technology are noted. Fourteen subsequent papers deal with aspects of agriculture, animal husbandry and the use of plants, technologies and craft skills (leather, skeletal materials, textiles, metalworking, ships and shipbuilding, weapons and armour and glass) and aspects of consumption and well-being (food and health). There is also a review of how the Portable Antiquities Scheme in England has transformed the evidence for and understanding of a range of material culture types. The volume is robustly produced and well laid out, with full references, index and suggestions for further reading. Illustrations are monochrome and the quality varies: some redrawing from primary or secondary sources is poor.

The essays embody an impressive range of scholarship and expertise. Space does not permit detailed discussion of individual contributions, and it would be invidious to compare and contrast, but the chapters on leather working (Quita Mould and Esther Cameron), skeletal materials (Ian Riddler and Nicola Trzaska-Nartowski) and metalworking (David Hinton) are models of concise and authoritative treatment, the contributions on plants (Carole Biggam) and textiles (Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale Owen-Crocker) are both able to draw on the results of major projects to enhance linguistic and textual understanding, and the discussions of animal husbandry (Christopher Grocock) and the silversmith's craft (Elizabeth Coatsworth and Michael Pinder) bring contemporary experience to bear on understandings of past practice. However, coverage is not comprehensive (why are the built environment and working in wood treated only tangentially, and ceramics hardly mentioned?) and the demands of handling a range of sources sometimes leads to over-reliance on views that are not fully current (archaeologists do not usually refer to the seax as ‘scramasax’; the value of material and archaeological sources goes well beyond their capacity to illuminate texts; London should at least be mentioned in the brief discussion of major Middle Anglo-Saxon trading settlements; there is clearly a substantial monetised and market element to the economy from the early eighth century). There are also some significant disparities in fundamental approach. The scope of the volume encompasses seven centuries which saw very significant social, political, economic, cultural and ideological changes. Some contributors are keenly aware of this and offer appropriately nuanced discussions which are sensitive to chronology and contexts; others, however, appear to treat Anglo-Saxon culture or an Anglo-Saxon world view as somehow monolithic, regardless of time, place or personal circumstance. It is hard not to feel that editorial intervention or peer review should have addressed these issues.

As a synthetic and thematic volume, then, this is not wholly successful and arguably delivers less than the sum of its parts. Despite the opening manifesto there is little sense of a consistent agenda that engages with current thinking on materiality and culture and in this respect there is an appearance of opportunity missed. It is now a commonplace that material culture is actively constituted, and a more explicit editorial encouragement of cognitive, phenomenological and experiential perspectives might have yielded a more powerful and coherent examination of the material realities of past lives, locating and integrating the Material within Culture rather than treating Material Culture as something self-contained to be defined through raw materials, technologies and terminologies. This may seem a harsh observation but although there is much of quality and value in the individual contributions this is in essence a portmanteau collection that does not fully realise its more ambitious thematic aims.