This volume provides a very welcome treatment of a writer who has languished far too long in the shadow of his more illustrious twelfth-century predecessor, Otto of Freising. Godfrey of Viterbo, chronicler and long-serving clerk in the imperial chancery, was held in low regard by nineteenth-century scholars, who failed to accord him the honour of a complete edition of his writings. Historians since then have looked more kindly on Godfrey's achievements, and the present collection represents one of the most substantial attempts yet made in the English language to convey the fruits of recent research on his writings and their readership. The contributors have ably demonstrated that the shortcomings of Waitz's Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition need not prove an insurmountable obstacle. However, it is hard to see how further light can be shed on persistent areas of uncertainty, chiefly surrounding Godfrey's career and the precise relationship between his various works, until there is a complete critical edition; in this respect I can only add my voice to those of the various scholars represented here and plead that this important task, daunting though it may be, be undertaken soon.

Godfrey's writings were universal and encyclopaedic in nature, mixing history and legend with imperial propaganda and apocalyptic prophecy. This eclecticism, so unpalatable to earlier generations of positivist historians (as Maria Dorninger observes in her invaluable tour d'horizon of modern scholarship on Godfrey), ensured a wide readership in the later Middle Ages. Numerous manuscripts have survived, and as such there is ample material for the historian. In this collection, nine scholars survey the range of purposes for which Godfrey's writings were quarried by medieval, and indeed modern, readers; in addition to chapters on the significance of Godfrey's political ideas and their use by later medieval imperial writers, the volume includes studies of surviving manuscripts from Castile, the Plantagenet empire, Bohemia, Italy, Poland and Aragon.

Godfrey did not simply ‘make a heap’ of all he found. As Jean Dunbabin and Kai Hering set out in their stimulating (though, in Dunbabin's case, somewhat brief) contributions, Godfrey was innovative in his exposition of the Hohenstaufen genealogy, enshrining kings, emperors and gods in a glorious imperial lineage designed to underpin the empire with a new hereditary ideology after the travails of the Investiture Controversy and papal schism; so, by Godfrey's reckoning, Frederick Barbarossa could count among his ancestors not merely Charlemagne, but Alexander the Great, Aeneas and even the god Jupiter (styled as first king of the Athenians). How useful this actually proved for Frederick or his successor Henry vi is unclear, turning as it does on the problematic question of how much influence Godfrey actually had at the Hohenstaufen court; this is still debated, though helpful suggestions are made by the various contributors. Yet the notion of imperialis prosapia, articulated most explicitly in Godfrey's first historical work, the Speculum regum (1185), provided a ready source of legitimisation for later claimants to the imperial dignity. Among these were Alfonso x of Castile and Charles iv of Bohemia, as examined in thoughtful contributions by, respectively, Thomas Foerster and Václav Žůrek. More generally, the imperial content of Godfrey's work (including, in his Pantheon, a detailed discussion of the significance of the imperial insignia) had an attraction for readers under quasi-imperial powers, both nascent and well-established; so does Stefan Burkhardt's account of manuscripts of Godfrey's writings produced in Venice and Rome, neither of whose authorities necessarily had much interest in appropriating the Hohenstaufen tradition. But to emphasise an overtly political reading of Godfrey is to fall into the trap that this volume quite rightly seeks to avoid, that of underestimating the significance of Godfrey's works on other levels. As repositories of a huge range of historical, geographic, ethnographic and legendary material, there was much in them to interest readers for whom the political content held no particular attraction; this is well brought out by Thomas Foerster in his assessment of surviving manuscripts from the Plantagenet Empire, and complemented by studies of the reception of Godfrey's writings in late medieval Poland and Aragon from Grischa Vercamer and Lidia Negoi, both of whom draw proper attention to the value of Godfrey's stories as entertainment and moral instruction. One aspect that also receives occasional comment is Godfrey's role in the transmission and interpretation of the Tiburtine Sibyl, and in the light of Anke Holdenried's recent work on the reception of this text there would certainly be scope to give this separate treatment; but I offer this as a suggestion, rather than as a criticism of a volume that does not aim to be (indeed, cannot be) comprehensive in its treatment.

It does have to be said that, while many of these arguments are persuasive, the uncertainties surrounding the provenance and date of some of the manuscripts ensure that they must remain provisional, at least for the time being. In this respect Len Scales is on surer ground in his illuminating comparison of Godfrey with later imperialist authors, such as Alexander of Roes and Lupold of Bebenburg. Furthermore, Scales manages to avoid rehashing the biographical and historiographical information on Godfrey that does weigh down a few of the other contributions; given that Thomas Foerster elegantly covers much of this ground in his introduction, there seems little need for others to do so as well. Arguably a greater problem is that a collection such as this allows only conclusions of the vaguest kind: principally, that Godfrey's works were read in different ways by different readers. Since a formal summing-up would run the risk of labouring this rather obvious point, none such is offered here, though Lidia Negoi does make a few general remarks at the end of her contribution. Nevertheless, as she and others are at pains to point out, these essays should be seen as a starting point for further research; and in setting out so adeptly the lines along which this should be conducted, they are worthy of applause.