One of the unintentional consequences of the five-yearly Research Assessment Exercises carried out in British universities is that authors whose works are going to be completed in the last year of each cycle are under considerable pressure to ensure that they are published before the end of it, and so can be included in their own and their department's tally of publications to be assessed. Such necessary but regrettable haste may explain the extraordinarily high level of error in the book under review and the inadequate way in which it has been copy-edited.

Some examples will illustrate the various kinds of mistake to be encountered in it. Thus, words can clearly be seen to be missing on pp. 10, 11 and 12 amongst several others. On p. 13 the author invents the new word ‘unwielding’, clearly unable to decide between unwieldy and unyielding. Words are repeated twice in a sentence on numerous occasions. From such errors a copy editor should have saved him. For others he has to take responsibility himself, as in the following examples. Septimius Severus is called Septimus (p. 23). The battle of Adrianople is misdated three times (p. 87). The Emperor Jovian is erroneously described as a member of the Constantinian dynasty on p. 26 and again by implication on p. 80. Maximus is wrongly said to have been defeated by Constantius at Arles (p. 87), is mistakenly called Constantius ii (p. 103), and then erroneously made out to be acceptable to the eastern court (p. 106). Athalaric is confused with Amalaric (p. 141), as is ‘western’ for ‘eastern’ on the same page. Theuderic i is confused with Theudebert i (p. 275). Reccopolis is described as being founded ‘as a dedicated royal centre’, a claim for which there is no evidence (p. 221). The errors in the description of the Spanish Church (p. 229) would require a small essay to describe, and the claim that Wamba acted ‘as a representative of the see of Braga in the tenth council of Toledo’ is pure fantasy. This is but a selection.

One of the book's potential merits as a textbook for the study of the period it deals with is the way it is divided into eleven chapters, each of which is prefaced by a chronology and a summary of the principal events of the period to be covered, and each of which concludes with a bibliographical essay. Here, as in several of the judgements given in the text, the author's overconfidence and lack of care betray him. Not only are some of the suggestions quite absurd for the kind of student readership at which the book is aimed, as in the claim that the two volumes of collected articles by Eugen Ewig, Spätantikes und fränkisches Gallien constitute ‘the starting point for any serious study of Merovingian Gaul’ (p. 308). Bibliographical details can be wrong, as can the titles of books: Chris Wickham's Framing the early Middle Ages (Oxford 2007) is twice called Mapping the early Middle Ages, and to the late J. M. Wallace-Hadrill is attributed a hitherto unknown book entitled The Merovingian Church (p. 307). More seriously still, the author confidently recommends books that it seems he cannot have read and indeed may have never even seen. Thus, Peter Linehan's seven-hundred-page monograph History and the historians of medieval Spain is described as being his collected essays (p. 258), while E. A. Thompson's Romans and barbarians, which actually is a volume of essays, is described as a ‘study’, albeit then dismissed as ‘seriously flawed’ (p. 89). Finally, the six-page index is far too short and selective to be of serious use.

Readers of this Journal in particular may want to know how religious themes and ecclesiastical history in general are treated. To such a question the only answer must be the one word ‘badly’. Clearly Innes has no interest in and little understanding of the theological issues of the time. Thus, Monophysitism is described as a doctrine that ‘stressed the unity of Christ and God’ (p. 157) and Monotheletism is said to be about ‘a single will or energy uniting the Holy Trinity’ (p. 201). Innes finds it hard to credit that belief mattered, asserting, for example, that ‘practical issues … were more important than theological correctness at Whitby’ (pp. 354–5). His disdain for religious topics slips out in the vocabulary used in describing them. Thus Willibrord is said to have ‘an extended gaggle’ of disciples, his mission creates ‘a veritable hagiographical industry’ and Boniface is called a ‘self-styled holy man’ (p. 411). Religion is for Innes ultimately no more than a dimension of politics, as can be seen not least in his account of the Third Council of Constantinople (pp. 202–3). Islam gets no better treatment, as ‘the Islamic faith thus defined a tax-consuming elite … relatively unimplicated in local social relationships’ (p. 187). In general the author's literary style is marred by the use of colloquialisms and bizarre metaphors, interspersed with jargon borrowed from the social sciences, as in the incomprehensible phrase ‘historical scholarship is a difficult and iterative dialectic’ (p. xiv). Likewise, ‘kings plugged into this sphere of public action’, and city is attached to court ‘with supernatural glue’ (both on p. 220).

With so many hostages of his own given to fortune, the author might not have wished to be quite so dismissive of other scholars. Whenever the phrase ‘modern historians’ appears in the text, as it does rather frequently (for example pp. 87, 108, 114, 117, 125, 149, 271, 296, 299, 400), we soon realise that some unnamed practitioners of the art have fallen into error and Innes is about to set them right, in his opinion at least. He also enjoys sneering at ‘textbooks and popular histories’ (pp. 10, 69). He is condescending about earlier generations too, chiding them for ‘the sweeping judgements that for so long sufficed’ (p. 7). The publishers claim on the back cover that ‘this comprehensive and stimulating textbook is the first to present the last twenty five years of research in an accessible manner for undergraduate students’. The evidence does not seem to support this contention.