It is widely agreed that the first quarter of the eleventh century was an important moment in the history of the dukes and duchy of Normandy. These were the working years of Dudo of St Quentin, author of the first history of the region and its people. Samantha Herrick's book is a beautifully controlled study of three saint's Lives, written, she argues, within a couple of decades of Dudo's chronicle, and offering a ‘common vision of the distant past’ to add to what we have learned from Dudo. Chapter i introduces the Vita Vigoris, the Passio Nicasii and the Vita Taurini, and examines the evidence for placing their composition in the 1020s and 1030s. Chapter ii shows how the occasions for writing these Lives coincided with ducal attempts to project power in the frontier regions of the Bessin, Evrecin and the Vexin: Vigor was settled at the newly-founded monastery of Cerisy as part of a ducally-sponsored ecclesiastical recolonisation of the area; the memory of Nicasius usefully associated both French and Norman areas of the Vexin with the ducal-centred archbishopric of Rouen; and the cult of Taurinus was exported to Chartres to foster good relations between Duke Richard, his bishop of Evreux and Odo, the neighbouring count of Blois-Chartres. The following three chapters examine the content of these Lives, and convincingly demonstrate how the sacred memories of these saints were invented to mould understandings of and help legitimate ducal political ambition. The apostolic status of the saints, their robust evangelisation of those parts of Frankia later to become Normandy and the way they stamped their sacred authority over these regions and their peoples provided their authors with an opportunity to demonstrate apostolic continuity within the Norman Church and to align it with ducal authority. A final chapter puts these examples of Norman cultural production into a broader context of contemporary Frankish hagiography. It shows Norman hagiography as part of a wider Frankish interest in apostolicity in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but as exhibiting significantly discrete characteristics. Violent apostolic power and conversion are particularly emphatic themes in the Norman Lives, the former attribute shared with hagiography south of the Loire, and very unlike that of the rest of northern France. Herrick argues for the peculiar circumstances of what might be called Norman ethnogenesis as the key to these differences. The violent ruptures of Viking colonisation had established Normandy, and conversion to Christianity was a more recent (and perhaps even more current) experience for its elites than for those in other parts of France. These were bound to be sensitive issues requiring particular attention in works of Norman hagiography seeking to put the sacred past to the service of the present. All this amounts to a fascinating and assuredly scholarly series of expositions on the manipulation of relics and sacred heritage by religious institutions and elite families, the ducal foremost among them; the subtle flexibility of hagiography; the supreme importance of appealing to and – through conspicuous gift giving – weaving oneself into shared traditions of the sacred past; and the inextricable mix of politics and religion in the process of maintaining and articulating social relations at the highest political levels.