With Domesday Now: New Approaches to the Inquest and the Book, editors David Roffe and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan provide a very significant contribution to the detailed reexamination and reinterpretation of the Domesday Inquest and Domesday Book. The book derives from a conference, “Domesday Now,” which took place at The National Archives at Kew, London, in September 2011. Interestingly for a book the title of which proclaims the word “now” so loudly, the contributors are almost entirely a group of scholars who have been crucial to the reassessment of Domesday since the 1980s and in some cases the 1970s. The volume brings out the main themes of Domesday scholarship since the 1980s: the distancing of explanations of inquest and of book; close work on the Domesday manuscripts and their diplomatic, the latter increasingly aided by computerized texts; the question of the relationship of the book to preexisting texts, be they products of the Inquest or not; and the relationship of pre- and post-Conquest landholding and lordship patterns. The papers are all valuable. In general, they are designed very much for the specialist: often the reader will feel the need to have a facsimile or digital picture of the relevant manuscripts ready for consultation if the arguments are to be fully appreciated and properly tested. Yet if detailed, most are readable due to the clarity of the authors’ prose.

The first chapter, “Domesday Now: A View from the Stage,” by David Roffe, provides an overview of many developments in Domesday scholarship, particularly since the novocentenary in 1986. It has sections on texts and databases; codicology and scribal history of Domesday Book; other Domesday texts; the context, procedure, and purpose of the inquest; the boroughs (a particularly interesting discussion); lords and land; settlements, land and taxation; the economy and society (for which Domesday emerges as a less useful, or at least less complete, source than one might expect); and communities, estates, and landscapes of lordship. The paper covers a vast range of publications, including by some of the younger scholars who do not appear in the volume. While there is no effort to impose a single set of interpretations within the volume, this overview sometimes does involve a reassertion of Roffe's own views, with the element of debate occasionally rendering the overview less clear.

Chapter 2, J. J. N. Palmer's “A Digital Latin Domesday,” is extremely useful, both on the difficulties of producing such a Latin text and on its utility for allowing analysis of word forms to reveal how far the Domesday scribe acted simply as a copyist of preexisting texts. Palmer also concludes that when Domesday mentions a tax assessment it applies both to 1086 and to 1066, unless stated otherwise. Close attention to the manuscript is maintained in the next chapter, again by David Roffe, “McLuhan Meets the Master: Scribal Devices in Great Domesday Book.” Like Roffe's earlier work, it emphasizes “soke” as the key expression of relationships within the manor. Further close examination of vocabulary is undertaken to good effect in Frank Thorn's “Non Pascua sed Pastura: The Changing Choice of Terms in Domesday.”

Chapter 5 sees the first of the papers from outside the established group of scholars. Ian Taylor's “Domesday Books? Little Domesday Book Reconsidered” derives from his 2008 University of Glasgow undergraduate thesis. In it he argues that Little Domesday was “was compiled when the concerns of taxation and service were still current. It was not the first attempt at Domesday Book but a separate enterprise” (147). In “Hunting the Snark and Finding the Boojum: The Tenurial Revolution Revisited,” Ann Williams makes a detailed study of Abington Pigotts in Cambridgeshire to demonstrate important continuities across 1066, a theme maintained by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan in her chapter “A Question of Identity: Domesday Prosopography and the Formation of the Honour of Richmond.”

The focus returns to the form of entries in the Domesday Book and their possible relationship to preexisting documentation, in Pamela Taylor's “The Episcopal Returns in Domesday.” She emphasizes that “embedded returns” (204) do not necessarily reflect seignorial manipulation of the composition of the book. The chapter makes numerous interesting points, for example about Lanfranc's suppression of mention of Stigand in Kent entries. It also has stimulating suggestions on other subjects, such as shipsokes and triple and private hundreds.

A second chapter from outside the core group of scholars is Andrew G. Lowerre's “Geospatial Technologies and the Geography of Domesday England in the Twenty-First Century.” Lowerre gives an immensely useful summary of existing resources, although a summary that inevitably will become quickly outdated. He also makes specific points about the Domesday record, for example challenging Roffe's arguments that a great quantity of resources were left unrecorded in the Domesday Book (243). Howard B. Clarke provides very useful editions in appendices to his “Condensing and Abbreviating the Data: Evesham C, Evesham M, and the Breviate,” and he speculates that such abbreviations may be linked to what he calls “Flambard's Domesday,” put together under William Rufus. Sally Harvey's “A Deed without a Name” looks at aspects of legal procedure in Domesday, in particular the offers of ordeal in matters concerning land; she shows the need to distinguish use of ordeal to prove a matter of title from use of ordeal to answer challenges as to the veracity of testimony. She suggests that the awe inspired by the proceedings of the Domesday Inquest may underlie the very name Domesday Book.

Roffe provides a concluding chapter with “Talking to Others and Talking to Itself: Government and the Changing Role of the Records of the Domesday Inquest.” The volume ends with a fine tribute by Frank Thorn to his wife Caroline Thorn, whose contribution to Domesday studies has been immense. Overall, the Boydell Press is to be congratulated on publishing this major work of serious scholarship.