In 1901 Heinrich Hagenmeyer published an edition of letters relating to the First Crusade entitled Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100. Some of them have since been discussed by scholars, but Smith’s book is the first general work on this issue since then. It considerably revises and amends the research done by Hagenmeyer and others. In general, the letters in question are not many: only twenty-two First Crusade-related letters written by popes, crusaders, prelates and also by the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch to the Westerners survived (p. 3). Nevertheless, they often provide information important to clarifying various issues of First Crusade history. Since Hagenmeyer’s book was published, new manuscript witnesses of crusade letters have been discovered: twenty are listed in the appendix of the book, many of them having been found by Smith.

The main part of the book is a detailed, meticulous analysis of each letter. This research is mature: it was preceded by a series of articles, including one in this Journal. Smith’s book is not something to be read quickly: it is a highly concentrated in-depth analysis, where many details matter – a true detective story, where, above all, such questions as the authorship, date and authenticity of the letters, as well as the circumstances of their composition are reconsidered. Possible intertextualities with other crusade narratives, structural similarities with similar epistolary products and other important matters are taken into account. There are some letters that survive only in copies made in the modern era, but are considered to be genuine by Smith too (pp. 32, 37, 47). The are a lot of letters which had been considered inventions by previous scholarship, but in case of two letters of Alexios i to Abbot Oderisius i of Montecassino Smith is the first to doubt their veracity (p. 21–8). Sometimes, analysis of structural similarities with other contemporary letters of the same nature is difficult to carry out: this is the case of supposedly Byzantine letters, since such Latin Auslandsschreiben are very few (p. 26); it is also difficult to find crusaders’ private letters which can be compared with the two letters of Stephen of Blois (p. 79). At the same time we can sometimes endorse our hypotheses that some letters are genuine by the fact that they survived in codices currently preserved in the regions where they were first sent (see for example p. 86). In some cases, letters are referred to in other crusade-related almost contemporary sources. For example, a likely genuine letter of the crusade leaders to Pope Urban ii (1098) is interpolated in the chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres: we know that he lived in the Latin East after the crusade and while writing his chronicle, and thus we know that copies of the letter were in circulation there (pp. 120, 177). Another interesting example is that Guibert of Nogent mentions that Anselm of Ribemont sent two letters to Archbishop Manasses of Reims – probably those published by Hagenmeyer (p. 91).

Smith does not concentrate exclusively on the question of the authenticity and historical context of the letters. He goes further, examining issues of reception. I totally agree with him that we should not dismiss the invented letters as forgeries: they were forgeries that were copied in the Middle Ages, and it is important to understand the context of their creation and transmission (p. 7). There are some interesting observations on possible forms of transmission. For example, we have a single-sheet copy of the so-called ‘Laodicea letter’ of the crusade leaders to the pope (1099) extracted from a bookbinding, which could theoretically have circulated as an unbound copy in the Middle Ages (pp. 1–2, 164). One of two letters of Stephen of Blois is written on two bifolios preserved in a post-medieval compilation, and the dorse of the first bifolio is blank: this allows us to think that it was conceived as a sort of pamphlet (pp. 63–4, 164). Based on this, we can suppose that there were other copies of similar nature in the Middle Ages; due to evident conservation factors, those copied in codices almost exclusively survived. There are interesting examples of postscripts added to letters in several manuscripts which shed light on the context of circulation of the letters. There are also some very interesting notes on the codicological context of the extant copies of letters. There are three cases where the ‘Laodicea letter’ is found in manuscripts containing material which can be considered as relating to the crusade preaching (p. 174). Although, given the thorough nature of the book, Smith may have taken into account all the necessary information, it would however have been useful to provide a detailed analysis of these codices to make readers sure that letters in question already formed an entity with preaching-related texts in the Middle Ages.

Smith’s book also contains some interesting reflections on the geography and chronology of the spread of the letters given the available data on the manuscripts. However, since letters are sometimes of very different nature, it would also be useful to track individual trajectories of transmission as well, probably taking into account the genealogy of manuscripts where it is possible to make assumptions on it. While reading the book, we see that the number of extant copies of letters is very uneven: generally, they are very few, and we have lots of copies only in case of those letters which were often copied together with the chronicle of Robert the Monk (a spurious letter of the Byzantine emperor Alexius i to Robert of Flanders; an alleged letter of Patriarch Symeon of Jerusalem; the so-called ‘Laodicea letter’ of the crusade leaders; see pp. 15, 111, 131, 156–60). To what extent such an elevated number of copies is due to this would be an interesting question to answer one day.

All in all, Smith’s book is certainly the latest word in crusade studies: a fundamental reconsideration of all the letters of the First Crusade, using modern techniques and carried out at a very high level.