The title of this slender volume, also available as an e-book, appears misleading at first. The story of the encounter of King Henry iv and Pope Gregory vii at the castle of Canossa in late January 1077 is of course not a legend but, as Fried clearly demonstrates, such is the cultural remembrance of the 1077 meeting, in particular among German medievalists. Based on an often neglected manuscript fragment from Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and a carefully documented calculation of travel times in the late summer, fall and winter of 1076/77, Fried persuasively establishes that negotiations between pope and king must have preceded the meeting of the German opposition at Tribur on 1 November 1076. Fried's chain of argument is convincing especially because it is fully supported by the well-documented events at Canossa itself. According to the author, the meeting at the castle of Mathilda was the successful conclusion of extensive diplomatic negotiations that began with Henry's absolution and ended with an agreement that might be called a treaty between the imperial party and the pontiff. Gregory did not undertake the northward journey in order further to weaken Henry, let alone to humiliate him, but the intention was instead the re-establishment of harmony in the Empire. This should not come as a surprise, for Hildebrand/Gregory's respect for the Empire and her Salian rulers is well known. Not Canossa, but the assembly at Forchheim in March 1077, where the German opposition elected a new king despite Henry's reconciliation with the Church, represents a Wende or dramatic change in policy (p. 155). Not until the Lenten synod of 1080, when Gregory excommunicated the king a second time, was there a fundamental change in the relations between king and pope. Fried uses the events of Canossa as a sample illustration of the deconstruction of the process of remembrance that he has detailed in numerous recent publications under his term ‘Memorik’, meaning science of remembrance. The present book also owes its very welcome existence to Fried's freely expressed frustration with the lack of intellectual openness and willingness among historians to depart from inherited distorting patterns of thought that in the case of Canossa go back all the way to the contemporary and extremely partisan Annals of Lampert of Hersfeld. The characteristics of the book as a polemic (Streitschrift) may make the exposition occasionally difficult to follow for non-specialists. It is therefore most welcome that almost simultaneously with Fried's study Wolfgang Hasberg and Hermann-Josef Scheidgen have edited a volume of essays by medievalists, agreeing or disagreeing with Fried's thesis (Canossa: Aspekte einer Wende, Regensburg 2012). The essays illuminate individual issues raised by Fried, but, according to this reviewer, even negative interpretations do not invalidate his conclusions, even if hypothesis was not always completely avoided.