Richter's book provides a useful overview of the early centuries of monastic existence at Bobbio in northern Italy. Bobbio was founded c. 613 by the ecclesiastic Columbanus and the Lombard King Agilulf. As Richter points out, it was to become the most important monastery in the north of Italy during the period of Lombard rule and it continued to be so when the Carolingians took power in Italy in the ninth century. Its manuscript collection evidently matched its high status: today several dozen manuscripts survive from early Bobbio, testimony to the very great resources and ambitions harboured at the monastery. But what is especially remarkable is that Columbanus was an Irishman; and so we are presented with the fascinating opportunity of analysing the interaction between Insular and continental cultures. Richter notes that modern Italian medievalists consider Bobbio's Irish associations and characteristics to have died out after the time of Columbanus (see, for example, p. 67), but a good deal of his book is devoted to challenging this assumption. So Richter guides us through the early constitution of the community (as far as this can be reconstructed), tells us of the Irish associations of various of its abbots, talks about numerous artefacts which display Irish influence and tentatively discusses interaction between the abbreviation system used at Bobbio in the writing of manuscripts and its Irish equivalent (Richter nowhere refers to the work of David Dumville, including that on the Insular abbreviation system, such as A palaeographer's review: the Insular system of scripts in the early Middle Ages or Abbreviations used in Insular script before A.D. 850: tabulation based on the work of W. M. Lindsay). A particularly interesting point made by Richter is that Bobbio's adoption of the Roman method of calculating Easter encouraged Ireland to make a similar change (see pp. 61–2); if this can be accepted, it would have significant implications for just how close the contact continued to be between the continent and Ireland in the period after Columbanus' death. Richter's book also gives us a picture of life at the monastery: the building works of men such as Abbot Agilulf (pp. 116–17) and the operation of the library and its likely book collections. Nor does he neglect the documentary sources, discussing the importance of items such as the Breve memorationis (dated 833–5? by Richter, at p. 121), which was the first to describe the various institutions of the monastery in Bobbio, and also documents such as the two late ninth-century Adbreviationes (dated 862 and 883 respectively by Richter, at p. 127), which take the form of estate surveys and are a significant aid in assessing the agricultural workings of early Bobbio. It was with the collapse of the Carolingian era after the death of Louis ii that local aristocrats began to dominate the scene and so to threaten the possessions of monasteries such as Bobbio. In a last attempt to guarantee Bobbio's standing Richter tells us how, in July 929, Columbanus's body was disinterred and paraded to Pavia in an attempt to promote the community's rights. (It was returned to Bobbio two weeks later.) The saint's body is said to have effected many miracles and so to have persuaded defrauders of the community's estates to return them (see pp. 171–2). With this account of the movement of Columbanus' body to guarantee the religious community's possessions, one is very much reminded of St Cuthbert's community in the North of England during the Anglo-Saxon period, all the more so because it too was originally an Irish foundation.