This valuable collection of essays seeks to explore the earliest historical narratives produced in the north-eastern European periphery during the course of the twelfth century. The volume contains thirteen papers by a range of leading experts, dealing with a rich and (for many Anglophone students) unfamiliar assemblage of texts. In the introduction Ildar Garipzanov succinctly sets out the book's aims and limits, before offering an original contribution on Adam of Bremen. From there the book is divided into four sections, which correspond to the different regions under consideration: Parts i and ii deal with Latin and Old Norse Scandinavian narratives respectively, taking in Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic texts; part iii is concerned with east-central Europe, with essays on Gallus Anonymus' Deeds of the princes of the Poles, Cosmas of Prague's Chronicle of the Czechs and the Gesta hungarorum; part iv focuses on eastern Europe, with two discussions of the Kievan Primary chronicle, along with a look at early annalistic writing from Novgorod. Specialists can profitably consult individual chapters and sections, yet the volume as a whole has much to offer those more generally interested in medieval historiography, not least because it makes available a wealth of material written in – and often based on – languages well beyond many medievalists' comfort zones. Each chapter offers a close reading of the text(s) in question, but also serves as an introduction for the uninitiated, providing overviews of content and historical and literary contexts. As Garipzanov states in the introduction, all the contributors approached their texts from a common angle, analysing them as expressions of Christian identities, and asking how they were shaped and influenced by available textual resources – biblical, classical and others. This thematic cohesion allows the reader to draw comparisons and contrasts between the different approaches of medieval authors to similar topics. All the texts, for example, were written around a century after conversion to Christianity took place, yet the strikingly different attitudes towards pagan history discussed in chapters ii, v, viii, x and xii demonstrate that there was no common way to treat the pre-Christian past. It was fascinating to see how different kingdoms developed different narrative styles to reflect their own political situations (ch v and vii on Norway and Iceland), how different authors reacted to and utilised Adam of Bremen's History (chs ii, vi and vii), and how education (often in the western European lands) and the direct and indirect knowledge of historical models could affect the writing of history (chs i, iii, iv, v, viii, ix, xi, xiii). There are some minor formatting flaws that take a little bit of the shine from the book (the footnotes in chapters ix and xi, for example, are in larger print than the others). The volume as a whole, moreover, could have benefited from either a longer introduction or a conclusion, so as to develop more fully some of the crucial common themes running through it.