One hundred and fifty years after the publication of Léopold Delisle's Catalogue of the charters of Philip Augustus, the task of transforming Delisle's calendar into a proper edition is at last entering its final stages. Beginning in 1916, under the direction of Henri-François Delaborde, and continuing with a further three volumes published in 1943, 1966 and 1979, the edition has now reached its sixth volume, taking the tally of Philip's charters published to date to something over 2,000. Thanks to the devotion and peerless expertise of Michel Nortier, who was also responsible for the fourth volume of charters published in 1979 and who made significant contributions to the complimentary edition of Philip's registers published by John Baldwin for the Académie in 1992, the present two volumes contribute greatly to our knowledge of Capetian politics, administration and diplomatic. In volume v, sixty entirely new charters are added to what was intended to be the final tally reached in 1979, a dozen of them surviving as originals either in poorly catalogued provincial archives or amidst the great stygian bog of the S series in the Archives nationales. Nortier then sets out, in a further 200 pages of appendices, a series of supplementary acts or references to acts now lost, including lost or spurious ordonances on coinage and the Paris gilds, records of judgements made before the king, references to lost treaties of pariage, gifts recorded in the registers which may have involved the issue of letters and a calendar of the nineteen lost administrative writs recorded in Philip's Budget of 1202–3. He also supplies a concordance between the items published thus far in the Recueil and the numbered entries in Delisle's Catalogue, and a full geographical survey of the places at which the king is known to have issued charters. In the last 300 pages of volume v, and here with uncanny echos of the decorative saga of the Forth Road Bridge, he supplies detailed corrigenda to nearly all the charters published in the first four volumes of the Receuil, ranging from the correction of minor errors and the insertion of references to the scribes identified by Francis Gasparri, to the presentation of newly rediscovered originals and, in a surprising number of cases, the first ever printing of full texts of charters which the editors of earlier volumes in the series believed to be lost or to survive only in a partial state. In future, no scholar should attempt to use volumes i–iv of the Recueil without Nortier's corrections in volume v ready to hand. Amidst Nortier's new charters and appendices, there are many gems: for example, five new Norman charters issued during or immediately after the conquest of 1204 (nos 1857–60 and 1864), including one (no. 1858) issued during a previously unknown siege of the castle of Chambois in the Orne; a licence to elect a bishop of Châlons (no. 1877) to add to the valuable, and for the most part Norman evidence which Nortier supplies (pp. 151–6) for the Capetian licencing system in ecclesiastical elections; and two new charters (nos 1865 and 1875) and a lost ordonance (pp. 173–4) relating to the Jews, in which context it is surprising to find no reference to W. C. Jordan's work on Philip and the Jews. British historians may be struck by a comparison between the fifteen judgements recorded from Philip's court and the thousand or more final concords which survive from an equivalent period in English legal history, whilst the mere nineteen administrative mandates referred to in Philip's Budget stand in stark contrast to the many dozens of royal writs that are recorded in any of the English pipe rolls. Nortier has an especial flair for detecting forgery, and displays equal forensic skill in exposing the misattribution to Philip ii of letters in fact issued by other French kings, including several which somehow found their way into earlier volumes of the Recueil. What is more, he has since crowned the achievements of this fifth volume with a sixth, in which he prints 150 letters of doubtful authenticity extracted from dictaminal formularies, most notably from the various redactions of the so-called Flores dictaminum attributed to Bernard of Meung. Nortier, unlike various of his predecessors, is unwilling to accept these letters as authentic productions of the royal chancery. He none the less acknowledges their usefulness in supplying echoes of events and opinions that might otherwise be forgotten, here most notably in their reference to a marriage proposal between Philip and a Castilian princess (no. 43) and the nicknames ‘Rufus’ and ‘The Little Fox’ (vulpecula) applied by the Capetians to the English king, Henry ii (nos 24–5). Once again, there is interesting material here on the Jews (no. 144, showing an exaggerated horror of Jewish usury), a certain lack of familiarity with English sources (i.e. in the notes to no. 129, which could possibly apply to Joan, the daughter of King John married to Hugh ix de Lusignan, but which can hardly apply to King John's Eleanor, married to William Marshal the Younger), and a great wealth both of learning and of newly mined materials. Only one caveat can be directed against Nortier's magnificent endeavours, set against two substantial criticisms to be raised with the Académie. By presenting his appendices in separately numbered series, and by including amongst these appendices only a fraction of the total number of mentions of lost acta that have already been discovered, Nortier poses problems of referencing which might have been avoided had the items in the appendices been numbered in continuation of those previously printed in extenso. The Académie, and Boccard as their publishers, are more seriously at fault for permitting the first two volumes of the Recueil to go out of print before the edition as a whole has been completed. Moreover, the Académie should be urged, in the strongest possible terms, to support Nortier's single-handed endeavour to index the entire corpus not just of Philip's charters but of the registers, published as recently as 1992. Thanks to Nortier's concordance, one can more easily employ the indexes to Delisle's Catalogue to trace texts in the Recueil, but Delisle's index is patchy and a century and a half old. The Académie is even older, and, by British standards, almost unimaginably rich. It might surely be expected to reprint the first two volumes of this edition and to supply a proper index, without scholars being required to await a further century and a half of heroic, individual labour.