For Walter Berschin the monasteries of St Gall and Reichenau – respectively the hermitage and the island – present a model of the interrelation of history, physical environment and culture. In this volume he offers a double literary biography, as it were, of the two monasteries, showing both their differences and their similarities. It includes five relatively short chapters on the libraries, scribes and painters, schools and churches, gardens and guests, and the ‘house-lords’ and ‘house-literature’ (such as the founders and patrons), and two longer chapters on poets and scholars and on historians. Following the text are two parallel tables comparing the literary histories of the two monasteries from the early seventh century to the beginning of the nineteenth, three extensive bibliographies concerned with both the monasteries and with each of them individually, sixteen plates (five in colour), and lists of abbreviations and of manuscripts and documents, but no index. In this second edition the notes and bibliographies have been revised and the text expanded to give more attention to tropes as well as sequences, of which several are cited in extenso, with German translations, in the chapter on poets and scholars. Berschin stresses the novelty both of Notker of St Gall, ‘the first great master of the poetry of sequences’, who, he says, should be called ‘the poet’ rather than ‘the stammerer’, and of Tuotilo of St Gall, the first known poet of tropes, the textual and melodic expansions of the songs of the Roman rite. Somewhat later, about 1000, a circle of liturgical poets emerged at Reichenau, where the use of unusual terms and Greek words was a characteristic feature of the ‘Ottonian style’. The author describes the sequence on Mary Magdalen by Hermannus Contractus as a treasury of rare and precious words. Reichenau was on the whole more open to contemporary trends and more forward-looking, and less scrupulous in its hagiographical compositions, than St Gall, which was more enclosed and traditional. The influence of both Carolingian classicism and of eleventh-century learning was felt more slowly at St Gall than at Reichenau. In his conclusion Berschin attributes the differing literary identities of the two monasteries to three factors: their locations, Reichenau on a verdant island – ‘a Mediterranean place north of the Alps’ – and St Gall on the wild and wooded mainland; their founders, one a Roman missionary who travelled extensively and the other an Irish hermit seeking solitude; and, developing from these two, the foundation myths of Reichenau as an earthly paradise and St Gall as a hermitage surrounded by savage animals. These factors influenced the literature produced at the two monasteries as well as their histories and self-presentation.