With some 400 pictures intercalated into its vernacular text, the Old English Hexateuch is the most extensively illustrated early medieval manuscript that has come down to us. Reproduced in facsimile in 1974 (with an authoritative introduction by Peter Clemoes and C. R. Dodwell – whose principal findings are upheld here), and regularly ‘mined’ for images to evoke Anglo-Saxon ‘life’, the volume has not, however, received scholarly attention commensurate with its importance. A substantial monograph which aims to elucidate, on the one hand, the way in which this extraordinary manuscript was made and, on the other, how the result may have been perceived should thus be very welcome; and the present book does indeed bring significant gains in knowledge. Codicological study enables Withers to refine Clemoes and Dodwell's account of the production procedures: suggesting that the design was worked out quire by quire on the basis of balancing blocks of text and imagery, he argues that the volume falls into three subsections according to how the gatherings begin and end. Then, alive to the nuances of the Old English version (including its rubrics) and to the minutiae of the illustrations, Withers analyses the relations between text and image in particular narrative sequences. By extension he can highlight artistic strategies, evoke possible responses of early users, and explore the ‘frontier of seeing and reading’; he reasonably hypothesises a potentially diverse audience for the manuscript (pp. 177–9). More controversial, however, is his use of critical theory and the approaches and ‘language’ of one particular ‘school’ of art-historical discourse. This is not because awareness of such work cannot enrich the study of an illuminated manuscript (it can), but rather because of its prominence here and the extent to which it is treated as an authority in its own right: whereas the codicological and ‘philological’ evidence is carefully probed and tested and the modern scholarship on it subjected to appropriately searching review, the pronouncements of a handful of ‘theorists’ and of one particular art-historian (Michael Camille) are, by contrast, treated uncritically – effectively as primary sources, driving principles indeed. Conversely, one major line of enquiry is virtually ignored: having argued in detail for the (traditional) attribution of the manuscript to the scriptorium of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, in the second quarter of the eleventh century (ch. ii), it would seem logical to explore how it might then fit into what is known about the literary culture, manuscript production and general history of that house and its patrons at that time. There is no shortage of good, recent work on the abbey and its culture in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Some of it features in the bibliography, some (principally items published after 1999) does not; but little attempt has been made to exploit any of it. The illustrated Old English Hexateuch is thus an innovative study with ‘feet of clay’. If its (over)dependence on ‘theory’ is likely to polarise opinion, its under-exploitation of the broader manuscript and cultural context is unquestionably a weakness; while the prose style – heavy in terminology which, though fashionable among certain critics, can be obfuscating, even rebarbative – is hardly a strength. The final sentence must suffice to give an impression of the whole: ‘Past and future meet in the beholder's present gaze, a gaze that activates the multiple horizons of the narrative just barely contained within the manuscript, horizons that converge in the viewer's body’ (p. 293).