This book of essays is offered, Bejczy writes in the introduction, as a demonstration of three aspects of a ‘profound transformation’ of western moral thought during the twelfth century: its increasing systematisation; an increasing interest in the psychology of the moral agent; and a lively reception of classical moral philosophy. There are risks in claiming ‘renewal’ and ‘profound transformation’ for twelfth- century moral thinking when elements of continuity and of discontinuity in such thinking in the six or seven centuries since Ambrose, Augustine and Gregory the Great are left out of account, with partial exceptions in Bejczy's introduction and chapter on natural virtue and in the chapter by C. Billot-Vilandrau (at p. 242 and notes) on the poet Giles of Paris. That said, the essays gathered here are all learned, valuable and original discussions of twelfth-century writing, chiefly in Latin, about virtue and moral goodness, and more about these than about vice and guilt, chiefly also about personal morality and spirituality, but not excluding social aspects and government, nor ignoring some interesting consequences in the thirteenth century in writings ranging from those of Alexander of Hales to Eckhart. The volume has three parts. The first, with six essays on monastic thought, is especially concerned with Anselm of Canterbury and his correspondence, Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of Fouilloy. The second part, with five essays on scholastic thought, deals with virtues, lying and scepticism with a focus on, among other writers, John of Salisbury, Stephen Langton and Maimonides whose Guide, translated into Latin, entered mainstreams of Latin thought during the thirteenth century. To Marcia Colish's fascinating chapter on lying further helpful reference could be made to Gillian Evans's book on Getting it wrong: the medieval epistemology of error (Leiden 1998) and, given the references made here to thirteenth century thought, to M. S. Kempshall's book on The common good in late medieval thought (Oxford 1999). The third part of the book, ‘Diffusion of moral themes’, consists of three essays: on justice, liberality and avarice (an essay which perhaps over-emphasises the novelty of a money economy); on virtue and politics in English ‘historical’ writing by William of Malmesbury and Walter Map (but the latter is hardly a historian and there is, presumably, a belated recognition of this in the change of the chapter's title between pp. vi/9 and p. 317); and on Karolinus, a poem about the cardinal virtues and Charlemagne, which was written in French by Giles of Paris in about 1200. The bibliography is excellent and the book as a whole is fresh and stimulating.