This book, the third in the series, Christianity and Culture: Issues in Teaching and Research, is dedicated to the memory of Derek Brewer. Fittingly, the essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on which Brewer was working at the time of his death is one of eleven contributed by some of the best scholars of medieval romance literature. The essays are divided into four sections: ‘Christianity and the matters of romance’, ‘Issues and debates’, ‘Reading romances’ and ‘Teaching romances’. Each section contains three essays, except the last, which contains two lively depictions of American classroom teaching. It would have been useful for the editors to have included an essay from a master teacher in a European university, where the focus tends toward independent research and writing, especially at the graduate level. The romance writers connect to widely different aspects of Christianity and display different degrees of interest in religious faith. Chivalric convictions regarding military prowess, feudal loyalty, and individual knightly and family worth overlap with the militant Christianity of the crusades, loyalty to the Church, and the value of the individual soul. Also, chivalric values constitute this-world interests that neglect principles of Augustinian charity and the implications of life after death. Saracens are depicted as generic enemies to kill or convert, but also as worthy, chivalric opponents. A noble Saracen ruler may command the loyalty of a Christian knight. Secular females act independently and speak truths in their own voices in romances, probably written for laywomen, that parallel the lives of female saints. Two mothers and the miraculous birth of saintly kings appear at the centre of a romance expressing Ricardian spirituality. Romance writers taking up classical stories and pagan religion alternatively intercalate Christian details, reimagine ancient history, or cast the heroes as glorious but unredeemed. Celtic heroes and marvels of nature repeatedly pop up in the medieval landscape as well as in the mysterious Christian castles of the grail legends. Magic, that ancient arch-enemy of Christianity, is displayed by romancers for the pleasures of its glamour, but also as an extension of the natural or demonic worlds. Romance is a fictional and secular genre and as such has much to tell about lay responses to Christianity in the Middle Ages. The contents include: Helen Cooper, ‘Introduction’; Helen Phillips, ‘Medieval classical romances: the perils of inheritance’; Stephen Knight, ‘Celticity and Christianity in medieval romance’; Phillipa Hardman and Marianne Ailes, ‘Crusading, chivalry, and the Saracen world in Insular romance’; Raluca L. Radulescu, ‘How Christian is chivalry?’; Corinne Saunders, ‘Magic and Christianity’; K. S. Whetter, ‘Subverting, containing and upholding Christianity in medieval romance’; Andrea Hopkins, ‘Female saints and romance heroines: feminine fiction and faith among the literate elite’; Rosalind Field, Athelston or the Middle English Nativity of St. Edmund'; Derek Brewer, ‘Romance traditions and Christian values in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’; Michelle Sweeney, ‘Questioning Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: teaching the text through its medieval English Christian context’; and D. Thomas Hanks, ‘Teaching Malory: a subject-centered approach’.