Medievalists are a rather defensive lot. We often try to justify what we do to people who think of the Middle Ages as a thousand years of barbarism and superstition, a millennium when hardly anyone ever bathed. We find ourselves fending off both classicists who only want to talk of decline and Renaissance/Reformation scholars who argue for a rather deep rupture between the period we study and the birth of modernity. As the title suggests, this book is interested in exploring the continuity of medieval thought and ideas and thus their role in shaping modernity. I must disagree one of Muldoon's arguments for the importance of the book, when he writes that “many historians have little interest in the period beyond their narrow specialties” (5). Most of us think beyond our specialties constantly, in large part because we teach general courses and even upper level courses in areas outside our specialization.

Alas, the idea behind the book is better than the book itself. James Muldoon's introduction is promising, and he lays out the basic historiographical background as a demonstration of the need for a book such as the one he edited. The conclusion by Paul Monod is more a summary and a plea than an attempt to synthesize a collection of quite diverse and uneven articles and to draw broad conclusions about the medieval-modern divide from them.

Before looking at individual essays, let me point out two omissions that affect the entire book. First, there is no list of authors with brief descriptions of their work and their affiliations. Second, although the first article contains a full bibliography, none of the others do; nor is there a general bibliography. Sifting through the footnotes for a workable collection of works to consider is tiresome and should be unnecessary.

The subtitle contains the phrase “The World of the Reformation,” but there is surprisingly little about the Reformation in this collection. Only one article focuses specifically on the medieval-Reformation theme, Burton Van Name Edwards' study of the revival of interest in Carolingian biblical commentaries in the Reformation period. It is too technical for such a collection, evidence for which is the 14-page list of all printed editions of such commentaries in the 16th century. Two other articles certainly examine issues relating to the Reformation; but one, Bruce Braisington's study of the use of “Quod omnes tangit” in medieval canon law and 18th-century American political thought, really is tangential to the theme and intention of the book. The other, Jeannine Olson's study of the care of the poor, is interesting but a bit too ambitious in trying to survey the issue over more than a millennium.

The general theme of the articles is that the Middle Ages generated a lot more roots of modern thought and institutions than anyone suspects. We do not have articles about some of the obvious topics such as the nation-state, the development of vernacular literatures, or continuities in Christian iconography; and I appreciate Muldoon's efforts to include several topics that have not often been dealt with in terms of the medieval-modern divide. For example, Merien Pages' piece, “Medieval Roots of the Modern Image of Islam: Fact and Fiction,” attempts to show a wide range of attitudes toward Islam in the medieval West. Most of the article is an analysis of several different images of Muslims in medieval vernacular literature. This analysis is rather technical, and Pages needs a wider range of texts in order to make a more convincing case.

The article of Cary Nederman about the idea and practice of toleration in the Middle Ages directly challenges R.I. Moore and other scholars. His analyses of several important texts appear to be part scholarship and part a rather whiggish reading that starts with later developments and hunts for them centuries before they became a central theme of western thought. He makes a distinction between “toleration” and “liberal toleration” that is clearer and more useful to him than it is to me.

Two other pieces left me perplexed. One is George Dameron's “Purgatory and Modernity.” Although he has written a book about the Florentine Church in the age of Dante, I have trouble with an article about purgatory that makes little use of Dante. He uses a definition of purgatory from R. R. Atwell that sees it as a place for the “eradication of venial sins.” A popular Catholic website gives as an example of venial sin masturbation; certainly Manfred and Forese Donati are in purgatory for far more serious and fundamental vices. Margaret Kim writes about “atheism” (the way the word appears in her title) in a body of late medieval travel literature; I was never clear about exactly how she was using the word or exactly what her claim is.

The most substantial piece in this collection is James' Muldoon's study of the medieval origins of the idea of international law. He begins with the oft-repeated idea that Hugo Grotius invented international law, and he demonstrates that several medieval legal texts are sources and harbingers of Grotius' ideas. He makes a convincing case that, “European expansion took place within a legal framework” (196).

I wish Muldoon had given (or enforced) instructions to his authors to write articles that were not full of technical language and obscure references and that tried to frame their specific topics with some general thoughts of how their scholarship addressed the big question of the book. There is at least lip service to this in several articles, but too many of them read like slightly revised dissertation chapters.