Angels on the Edge of the World, which uses literary, historical, and geographic approaches to read maps and their contexts, traces the ways English national identity has been tied to England's geographic location at the edge of medieval mappae mundi. The book, which covers the years 1000–1534, is thoroughly readable and well organized. It presents a rich mine of contextualizing information for scholars of medieval studies and beyond. Angels on the Edge produces strong evidence that edges, borders, and wilderness are multivalent positions, both feared and revered in classical and Christian sources for medieval mappae mundi and the maps themselves. Kathy Lavezzo's sharp eye for connections leads her to conclude that England's relationship to Rome was—very much like its relationship to itself as border—marked by ambivalence.

Interest in pressing boundaries and borders is reflected in not only the methodologies but the coverage of this book, which spans Anglo-Saxon, medieval, and Reformation England. The chapters focus on five authors and on time periods termed “flash points of historical crisis” (21), when England needed to prove itself above its barbaric geographic situation. The flexibility and scope of Angels on the Edge cannot be overstated. For example, in chapter 3 we find Fredric Jameson, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Timothy Brennen illuminating one another. We also find a cultural studies reading of otherness augmented by a philological discussion of “straunge.” Angels on the Edge is an important contribution to contemporary questions at work within medieval studies and beyond.

The first chapter explores Aelfric's “exceptionally nationalistic” (31) version of the famous story of the future Pope Gregory's encounter with English slave boys, which characterizes the English as a blessed people who both inspired Gregory and were authorized by Rome. Creating a figural connection between this text and the Cotton Map, Lavezzo shows how Anglo-Saxons were racially and geographically unique. This chapter features a fascinating discussion of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England that adds depth to Aelfric's articulation of this familiar story.

Chapter 2 moves into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to explore how Gerald de Barri positions Ireland with regard to England and Rome. Gerald, in tandem with the “high medieval outpouring of English maps” (46), makes civilized England the gateway of Rome for remote Ireland. He casts the Irish monastic ascetic life as antisocial and backward in contrast to England, the civilized and civic-minded place akin to Augustine's City of God. Further, Gerald and his contemporaries draw upon crusading rhetoric to justify invasion: Ireland itself may be pure and sublime at the edge of the world, but its inhabitants are unworthy. When needing national cohesion in the face of foreign onslaught, English writers such as Aelfric used the otherness of England to make it distinct and special. When wanting to justify imperialist expansion, authors of Gerald's ilk used geographic placement to marginalize others: in this case, Ireland.

The third chapter detects in the Ramsey Abbey map and Higden's Polychronicon praise for England and an expression of English desire for the Roman Empire's power. Typically read as a “universal” text, the Polychronicon here is convincingly characterized as a work that seeks to mark England as powerful and self-sufficient. Linking the marginal with the exceptional, Higden associates Britain with Rome. Despite this link, there still appears to be anxiety over geographic placement. Evidently, one can praise England all one wants, but, because of geographic marginality, authorizing praise from Rome and Jerusalem is still necessary.

Chapter 4 shows the ways Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale is interested in the relationship between Roman and English law. It links empire to maternity in terms of “obligation.” This chapter asks whether Allah is ultimately unable to “receive the gift of Roman Christianity” (111) without being obligated to Rome. Deftly placing Custance in the context of debates about the supremacy of canon law or common law, this chapter emphatically argues that the Man of Law's Tale is crafted “not in a universal Roman but in a specifically English register” (96). Rome and motherhood threaten national integrity; therefore, Custance must be sent away from England. Contrary to the dominant reading of this tale, Angels on the Edge proposes that the Man of Law is interested in distinguishing England from Rome and claiming England as sovereign.

The conversation about sovereignty that is laced throughout Angels on the Edge comes into sharp focus in the final chapter on Cardinal Wolsey. Highlighting Wolsey's ambiguous relationship with Rome (as a man who draws upon all the trappings and ceremony of Rome and yet who never once visited it), Angels on the Edge counters traditional readings of the cardinal as “more Roman than English” (141). Wolsey separates Rome's power and ritual from Rome itself by grounding pomp and ceremony in English roots and soil, thereby making them English. Reading Wolsey and John Skelton's manipulations of boundaries, this chapter considers why, in the face of the discovery of the New World, the English still placed England at the edge of the world.

Angels on the Edge often features the striking pairing of the medieval and modern, and the book itself is framed by a linking of the marginal and yet marked medieval England to the tiny yet powerful England of the imperial era. Key portions of Lavezzo's argument rely on the reader being invested in associative and tropological thinking. For example, Wolsey's rise from a (perhaps) butcher's son to a prince of the Church is likened to England's rise from a backwater nation to powerful sovereign. Similarly, Ireland, England, Custance, and motherhood are all linked by the idealization of the “other” into the sublime. Angels on the Edge makes an important and successful contribution to “recent attempts at registering the ambiguities of history” (116); however, this investment in ambiguity may strike the reader as either frustrating or refreshing, depending upon temperament. Roman power is distanced yet appropriated, England is marginal yet central, and the past is unified and yet fragmented. It is at times difficult to be sure whether Lavezzo is suggesting that a thing is literally or figurally marginal, or when that marginal position becomes a position of power or oppression, which is perhaps part of the point of this deconstruction of the margin: we never really can be sure.