Wolfert van Egmond addresses the various modes of communication (written, oral, gesture) used by early medieval people to communicate with each other. The range of previously unstudied sources consulted is excellent and van Egmond's presentation effectively highlights the way in which a succession of writers from a single historical centre continuously reworked local tradition and memory. Chapter iv, in particular, represents an impressive engagement with the early manuscript tradition of each of the texts, significantly revising dating with respect to several of them. With the Revelatio Cocordemi, van Egmond brings to the attention of religious historians an important but badly neglected early vision narrative. This chapter should be consulted by all those interested in some of the ostensibly more obscure sources for Merovingian Gaul. One wonders how many similar sources from other dioceses await proper ‘discovery’ by historians. Unfortunately, however, the analysis of communication, the book's underlying theme, could have been more critically handled. For instance, the description of the bodily gestures associated with prayer as a ‘buffer’ between the divine and the human seems inadequate (pp. 44–5). The possibilities presented by communication are frequently represented in terms of a contrast between its written and oral modes. Ritual and gesture are discussed but in a way that does not quite answer the question why certain societies choose particular forms of communication, as opposed to what kinds of communication individual sources display and in what measure. In fact, many interesting parts of the book (for example early medieval marriage customs, pp. 169–82) have little to do with communication, as the author admits (p. 6). It might have been better to treat more systematically the particular problems posed by each text, including its author's aims, motivations and context. For instance, it seems possible to approach the Vita amatoris as an example of the way the memory of a long-dead bishop could be mobilised to contribute to sixth-century debates concerning clerical celibacy. Indeed, a more effective effort to situate the sources with regard to the period's broader historiographical issues would have broadened the book's findings. There certainly might have been a little more scope for van Egmond to challenge the existing historiography, or to use it to question the surface narrative of the texts. Once or twice he risks retelling his sources' stories overmuch – with some unnecessary citation of the Latin. There are also one or two infelicities in the otherwise fluent translation from the Dutch (for example ‘plus’ for ‘and’, ‘mass’ for ‘Mass’, pp. 158, 159, respectively). As for van Egmond's conclusions: authors in pre-Carolingian Auxerre maintained a striking awareness of the importance of the past to contemporary identities; more generally, the use of writing never disappeared between the fifth and ninth centuries, although there was a progressive clericalisation of access to the written word.