Rich in medieval architectural remains yet relatively impoverished in terms of chronicles or administrative sources, the parts of south-western France once ruled by the Plantagenet kings confront the historian with particular evidential difficulties. Even after the 1240s and the emergence of the so-called Gascon rolls of the English royal chancery, we know a great deal about Englishmen serving or trading in Bordeaux and its hinterlands, but comparatively little of local affairs handled via local lords or officials. Over the past twenty years, the publication of new sources has ensured that the mists over the Garonne and Dordogne have at least been stirred if not entirely dispelled. First, in 1996, came Charles and Arlette Higounet's edition of the Grand cartulaire of the abbey of La Sauve Majeure, followed in 2003 by the three-volume edition of Dom Étienne Dulaura's history of the abbey, composed in 1683. The cartulary of nearby Chancelade was published by Bernard Revuriego in 2000. In 2009 Jean-Loup Lemaitre published the Sauve-Majeure necrology, and in 2015 (in collaboration with Françoise Lainé), the obituary of the cathedral church of Saint-André at Bordeaux. Yvonne-Hélène Le Maresquier promises an edition, shortly to appear, of the pouillés or inventories of benefices for the province of Bordeaux, essential for the identification of churches and place names in a region where even the most basic toponymic details remain hard to establish. All of this reflects a new turn in French medieval studies. After a century of relative neglect, the edition of medieval administrative sources has reacquired an academic respectability last acknowledged in the days of Charles Bémont, before the First World War. The irony here is that this shift in fashions coincides with new threats to the teaching, and hence to the reading of Latin in French schools, in ways all too familiar to the Anglophone world. Meanwhile, the obituary of Saint-Émilion now joins the tally of newly published sources, edited from a composite manuscript preserved in the Archives départementales at Bordeaux. Here the margins of an early twelfth-century copy of the ubiquitous martyrology of Adon have been used to record more than 1,300 brief obit notices. These are arranged according to the liturgical calendar but infuriatingly without any further chronological details. The editors estimate that the obits were added, in upwards of fifty individual scribal hands, across the period from about 1110 to the late thirteenth century. It was during these years that Saint-Émilion was converted from a proto-Benedictine into an Augustinian community, eventually secularised in 1309 following a period of relative decline. The reforms of c. 1110, it is suggested, reveal the influence of the abbey of Saint-Ruf on the Rhône, perhaps communicated to Saint-Émilion via the abbey of Lesterps, north-west of Limoges. Not the least remarkable of the achievements of this present edition are the 120 pages of palaeographic analysis allowing identification of the hands in which each individual obit has been added, and hence a stratographic guide to their dates of composition. The obits themselves present the usual onomastic briar-patch, with only occasional relief where known bishops or abbots appear. Even here, despite a smattering of archbishops of Bordeaux, bishops of Bazas and one abbess of Fontevraud (no. 449, Joan d.1276), we find not a single king of either England or France, nor any lay aristocrat save for the vicomtes of nearby Castillon, Elie (either Elie i, d.1131, or Elie ii, d.c.1201, no. 258) and Pierre (perhaps Pierre iv, d.1227, no. 267). Of the six magistri, all are otherwise unknown and only two (P. de Ausurra ‘canonicus et physicus’, no. 648, and William de Birac, no. 1216) are assigned toponyms, in neither case with any attempt by the editors to suggest modern place-name equivalents. This reticence is maintained across the edition as a whole, no doubt with the best intentions and to avoid false certainty, but with a consequent lack of definition that will leave readers unfamiliar with the local landscape with even less sense of the human geography here revealed. This geography, as the editors rightly point out, is focused on the immediate vicinity of Saint-Émilion and the region between Garonne and Charente, with no connections apparent further south than Agen or further north than the Angoumois: a geography, in other words, highly localised, reflecting none of the connections that either Plantagenet government or the pilgrim routes to Spain might have been expected to have supplied. Here a map of place names to supplement that of confraternities (p. 63) would have been highly desirable. For the rest, the editors have carried out their work with meticulous accuracy, including an edition of a dozen confraternity agreements and a series of 102 plates, ninety-eight of them devoted to a full colour facsimile of the manuscript itself. Mysteries remain. As the editors point out, a surprising proportion of the obits are of women: 278 ‘sorores’, set against 333 ‘canonici et laici’, in both cases suggesting the admission of laymen and women to full spiritual benefits. This has important implications for the debate on Catharism and the supposed dearth of outlets for female piety in southern France. What, however, are we to make of an entry such as no. 345, recording Bernard Constantine as ‘canonicus regularis et laicus’? An entry, incidentally, that excites no comment in the introduction, nor any notice in the index of subjects. Saint-Émilion (once famed for the production of white rather rather than red wine), and its great medieval church, remain landmarks on the modern claret trail. The present volume, read in conjunction with an essay collection produced in 2011 (Frédéric Boutoulle, Dany Barraud and Patrick Henriet, Fabrique d'une ville médiévale: Saint-Émilion au moyen-âge) raises its subject to at least the level of the better-known unknowns, in a region where unknowing remains the rule rather than the exception.