This excellent book offers an insightful and carefully argued exploration of the Historia written by Richer, a monk of the monastery of Saint-Rémi at Rheims in the last years of the tenth century. Lake, who has also recently published a very useful translation of the Historia in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, approaches Richer's invaluable but challenging narrative of the political fortunes of the tenth-century West Frankish kings from a refreshing and fruitful perspective. Previous scholarship has frequently sought to uncover Richer's political leanings or to use his Historia as a means to investigate contemporary political culture, and Jason Glenn's study Politics and history in the tenth century (Cambridge 2004) provides a stimulating example of this approach. Lake instead situates Richer and his work within the context of the literary and intellectual culture of northern Francia in the later tenth century. Particular attention is devoted to the situation at Rheims itself where, under successive archbishops Adalbero (969–89) and Gerbert (991–8) – the latter of whom was the Historia's dedicatee – there was a remarkable burst of scholarly activity that laid great emphasis on the value of secular rather than sacred learning. Gerbert certainly held the study and practice of Ciceronian rhetoric in high esteem, and Richer, it is argued, was a product of this intellectual movement. As Lake states towards the end of the introduction, ‘if there is a single hermeneutical key that will bring most clarity to Richer's approach to history writing, it is Cicero's conception of history as a narratio constructed according to the rules of rhetoric’ (p. 28).

The book's argument is contained within five substantial chapters. Lake begins with a close scrutiny of Richer's prologue, taking into account the possible meanings of the dedication to Gerbert, the notable absence of some of the more common literary topoi found in other historiographical prologues, and the rhetorical roots of Richer's stated aim to write a narrative that was ‘plausible’. In the second chapter, Lake explores Richer's use of his sources, not least Flodoard, his historiographical predecessor at Rheims from whom Richer explained that he had employed a ‘very different rhetorical style’. By concentrating on Richer's manipulation and reshaping of the material found in Flodoard and other sources, Lake is able to cast the nature of Richer's own project into sharp relief. Richer frequently invented speeches and dialogue, simplified and amplified pre-existing narratives, and endeavoured to provide motives – always ‘secular’ – for his actors where none had existed before. In the third chapter, Lake pursues this line of enquiry further by underlining Richer's commitment to dramatisation and rhetorical inventio. The extent to which this commitment to inventio arose from direct engagement with Cicero's De inventione – or Marius Victorinus' commentary on it – occupies much of Lake's fourth chapter. Although Richer employed rhetorical terminology to categorise and classify speeches, the Historia reveals little evidence of its author's desire to write along Ciceronian lines in any form of sustained manner. Rather, rhetoric provided the general intellectual framework, but the speeches composed often owed much more to classical and late antique historiographical sources – especially Sallust and ‘Hegesippus’ (a Latin translation and abbreviation of Josephus' Bellum Iudaicum) – than to ‘the deployment of the classical art of rhetoric’ (p. 242). Some of the book's key themes converge in the final chapter, in which traces of Richer's ego are teased out from the pages of his Historia. The image presented is one of a self-confident and self-promoting writer keen to demonstrate his intellectual prowess to his readership at Rheims. As a result, Richer is compared with Gerbert and other contemporary notables who appear to have prided themselves on ‘ostentatious displays of learning’ (p. 265), something which is held to be characteristic of late tenth-century scholarly culture.

Throughout his study, Lake combines philological and historical analysis of the Historia, and makes very effective use of Richer's autograph manuscript (conveniently accessible in Hartmut Hoffmann's MGH edition). Lake also strives to compare Richer with other late tenth- and early eleventh-century historians, not only to note parallel developments (such as the use of stylised speeches) but also to bring out the Historia's more distinctive elements. The basic premise, moreover, that there is no need to ground the analysis of this text primarily in a political context is persuasive and important, and is further developed in the book's conclusion. More attention, however, could have been paid to the relationship between sacred and secular forms of learning, two categories which Lake often sets in contrast with one another. Strikingly, references to religion are conspicuously absent from Richer's work, as Lake highlights, but the implications of this could have been explored in greater depth. To what extent, for example, was the secular character of the Historia the result of its classicising style? Richer imitated ancient historians, yet he was a monk steeped in Christian learning and literature. Did the ‘reverence for secular learning’ (p. 270) at Rheims in the second half of the tenth century come at the expense of sacred learning, or was there more overlap and interaction between the two than sources such as the Historia might ostensibly suggest? These questions aside, there is much of value here. Lake's book offers fresh and exciting insights into Richer's work and the world that shaped it and, taken together with Lake's translation of the Historia, will make the text more accessible to new students.