To celebrate 175 years since the opening of St David's College, Lampeter (now University of Wales, Lampeter), which coincided approximately with the fourteenth centenary of the death of St David, a conference was held in Lampeter in 2002. At that conference were presented twelve of the twenty-one papers in this handsome volume which has been edited by Jonathan Wooding, director of the Centre for the Study of Religion in Celtic Societies (CSRCS) and the Very Revd J. Wyn Evans, dean of St David's Cathedral who, as I write, has just been elevated to the bishopric. The other papers were added to create a volume which ‘brought together studies of the key questions for research that emerged from that conference’ (p. ix). The book covers an impressive range of disciplines and presents papers under six main headings: the development of the diocese from the early community, the Life of St David, his cult, his relics and historical aspects of his diocese. After two introductory papers by the editors: Wooding, ‘The figure of St David’ and Evans, ‘Transition and survival: St David and the cathedral’, Heather James, in a detailed and well-mapped discussion, considers the geography of the cult of St David, and Mark Redknap discusses the implications of a find of a tenth-century Hiberno-Norse ringed pin 1·2 km north-north-west of St Davids. The core of knowledge of St David is his Life, which is preserved in a longer and shorter version in Latin and also in Middle Welsh, and the editors explicitly acknowledge that the next three chapters are ‘the focal point’ of the volume: chapter vi is a new edition by Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies of Rhygyfarch's Life; it is preceded by Richard Sharpe's penetrating discussion ‘Which life is Rhygyfarch's Life of St David?’ and followed by a brief stylistic discussion by Davies. Life naturally leads on to cult and one of the longest sections deals with different aspects of the cult: Graham Isaac provides a discussion of the tenth-century Welsh prophecy poem, Armes Prydain Fawr, which contains the earliest reference to St David in extant Welsh vernacular literature, and almost in passing a valuable new annotated translation of the poem; Jane Cartwright focuses on the cult of St Non, David's mother, in a discussion of rape, sanctity and motherhood in Welsh and Breton hagiography, while Bernard Tanguy considers the cults of Non and Divi (David) in Brittany. Two essays then consider the saint in the liturgy: Daniel Huws reviews the sources in a characteristically detailed and learned way, while Owain Tudor Edwards examines the Office of St David in one particularly beautiful manuscript, Paris, BN, ms Lat 17294: one is left regretting that the images on pp. 248–9 could not have been in colour. This section ends with David Howlett analysing the structure of ‘a triad’ of texts on St David. The next section, chapters xiv and xv, consider the relics of St David: Cowley provides a useful survey of the historical evidence, while Higham, Bronk Ramsey and Nokes give the volume a scientific dimension in their discussion of the radiocarbon dating of bones from St David's Cathedral. In a niche behind the high altar a number of bones were discovered in 1866 and it was thought that they might be associated with St David or perhaps St Justinian; sadly they turn out to have belonged to people living in the period from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. John Morgan-Guy discusses an interesting episode in the later history of St Davids in the 1920s and 1930s when a Roman Catholic chapel was built overlooking St Non's Well. The final group of papers considers various historical aspects: John Reuben Davies examines what can be known about the archiepiscopal activities of St David's; he concludes that there seems to have been an archiepiscopal see at St David's extending its jurisdiction as far east as the Wye until as late as the eleventh century. Huw Pryce examines the relations between St David's and the dynasty of Deheubarth through the medium of agreements made in the 1230s to settle land disputes. Julia Barrow discusses the statutes of St David's Cathedral between 1224 and 1259. The final two papers deal with more recent history: the late Sir Glanmor Williams deals with the impact of the Protestant Reformation and the issue of moving the cathedral to Carmarthen, while W. N. Yates offers a reappraisal of the diocese in the early nineteenth century. The volume closes with a consolidated bibliography, a hugely useful tool in its own right, and a detailed index.

This is a fine volume of essays and, while it would be invidious to draw attention to particular sections, readers of this Journal will surely be interested in the issues of Life, cult and relics which take up the middle part of the book. Within that, I merely follow the editors in pointing to the central importance of Richard Sharpe's essay on the relationship between the long and short versions of the Life, and the consequent new edition of the longer, Vespasian version of it edited by him and John Reuben Davies. Sharpe's argument essentially takes us back to the status quo before 1967. Before that the standard edition was that of the longer version by Arthur Wade Evans, but then J. W. James published an edition of the shorter ‘Nero-Digby’ text and argued that the Vespasian version was a later expansion. Sharpe's demolition of that argument and careful unpicking of the complex mixture of argument and prejudice is a tour-de-force. That new edition is worth the price of the book on its own. The shorter version, with the striking circulation pattern of its manuscripts outside Wales and none in Wales (except for a relatively recent acquisition by Cardiff Public Library in 1924), seems to be a shorter version produced at the behest of Bishop Bernard in his campaign for metropolitan status between about 1124 and his death in 1148: pretentious expressions, Greek vocabulary, strange syntax were removed, as were critical references to other saints, together with a general removal of all inessential proper names. These findings have implications for our understanding of the Welsh version which is derived from the longer version, but that is for another place.