This book is an impressively masterful, concise account of the long twelfth century's changing conceptions and practices of selfhood. It is written with exemplary clarity, treating patristic writings and postmodern historiographies with the same analytical sharpness and deft understanding. As Kramer observes, selfhood is the subject of multiple debates – not only over the origins and timing of its ‘emergence’ in Western culture, but in terms of its very definition, and indeed its experiential (not to mention communicable) reality. Mid twentieth-century medievalists drew justified attention to the transformations in interiority implied by the growing and then codified practice of confession, inaugurating the idea of the twelfth century's ‘discovery of the individual’. Much work has nuanced this picture in recent decades – while scholars of later (and earlier) periods have continued to assert that medieval individuals could have no true sense of ‘individuality’ in the modern understanding of the word. Kramer notes particularly the work of Timothy Reiss, for whom ‘the medieval experience of personhood as embedded in biology, community, and God, negated any possibility of a “willful … self, ruler of its individually judged and performed intentions”’ (p. 15).

Kramer is admirably balanced and restrained in her accounts of these historiographies, relying so obviously as they do on the notion that people in the Middle Ages were to some degree utterly different from ourselves. She rightly pinpoints a more important recent trend, which is the postmodern (or Foucauldian) turn to negation of a functioning individual self tout court. In this narrative, of which a brilliant example is one of Kramer's chief interlocutors, Susan Verderber's The medieval fold (London 2013), these twelfth-century developments were a programme of institutional control, designed to use rituals of confession and penance to interpellate the guilty subject, ‘because an illusion of individual subjectivity was advantageous for the Church’ (p. 109). Certainly there is a strand in medieval theology which shuns individuality as necessarily sinful, a turning away from the perfect image of God. But, as Kramer rather brilliantly illustrates, the theology of the Schools demanded much greater complexity from the individual's sense of selfhood in terms of this relationship with God, which is essentially predicated of our absolute freedom of will. Kramer sees the schoolmen ‘endeavoring to carve out a place for the soul's autonomous action in order to preserve both the notion that a soul is judged on the basis of its own history and their sense of divine justice’ (p. 109). For these theologians, she demonstrates, ‘autonomy was not a fiction’ (p. 110). Of course this does not mean that this was so – but as an argument it has the advantage of listening to the texts, and valuing the twelfth century's own understanding of these ideas.

Particular sections of the book offer fascinating detail about various questions. Chapter ii describes the understanding of tears as a spontaneous, uncontrolled and hence sincere – or autonomous and yet therefore feigned – form of communication, amply explaining why they carry both importance and ambivalence, and could not displace the sovereignty of oral confession. There is an excursus on disease as a metaphor for sin, and for the contagion of sins such as heresy; another on the relation between soul and body, and the creation of the soul, seems relatively tangential until it is tied to the theology of original sin, and Kramer is able to demonstrate the absolute necessity of the theology of the individual will. Her overall picture is firmly grounded, with long discussions of Augustine's and later writers’ contributions in the period prior to the twelfth century.

Kramer is if anything a little too self-effacing in this lucid and admirable book. She has a great deal to say that is original and controversial, and she does so (perhaps ironically) with very little trace of self-assertion. This is not as short a book as it appears, because (to this reviewer's dismay) the many Latin quotations are given only in translation, with the occasional phrase in the original; readers will need access to the online Corpus Christianorum. That aside (and it will not trouble everyone), this is an excellent book. For those new to the subject, its summary of historiography, fullness of background and clarity of prose will make it an ideal introduction. For scholars well-versed in the field, it offers important new arguments.