To an uncommon degree this second Corpus volume on the early medieval inscribed and sculptured monuments in south-west Wales deserves to be obligatory reading for ecclesiastical historians. In a period and a location where the literary sources are famous (for example, Gildas, Asser), but few and far between, this volume presents the material records, often with touching specificity, of generations of post-Roman, pre-Romanesque inhabitants of the landscape represented by the historic counties of Cardiganshire, Camarthenshire and Pembrokeshire.

While there is great aesthetic pleasure to be had from the extraordinarily subtle variations in the shapes of the crosses incised or carved in relief on pillars, slabs and most notably on water-worn boulders, there is markedly little iconography to read, and, with one or two exceptions, the handling of the Insular decorative repertoire on these monuments is of comparatively limited scope. What puts the Welsh Corpus in the forefront of studies of early medieval stone monuments are the inscriptions, in ogam, running upwards on a vertical base on the edge of the stones, and in Latin lettering of wonderful visual variety, running across the rough or prepared surface of the stones. These inscriptions are a vital record of social relationships and of the power and breadth of the Christian culture of the area.

Some of the surviving monuments were discovered, described and drawn by the enlightened late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Welsh antiquaries, only to be thrown out and lost in the rough world of farm gateposts and the like. Gradually these, and many more, have been gathered in again over the last two centuries, and are here catalogued in gripping detail, accompanied by carefully paired photographs and drawings of excellent quality. In very many cases these monuments are the only evidence of an early sacred site, a primitive kin cemetery, which afterwards gradually merged into a larger system of pastoral care and cult and hieratic centres of great fame and influence, notably St David's Cathedral.

The relationship of the expelled Déisi, the fifth-century settlers from Ireland, to the indigenous population, their Romanised predecessors and cohabitants, is cogently explained and expounded both in the introductory chapters and in the individual catalogue entries on the language and the name-forms of the inscriptions, showing for example that there was intermarriage between the Irish and the British and that some of the Irish recognised the merits of claiming tribal ancestry in the location of their memorials and the vocabulary used on them. The single language and remarkable bilingual inscriptions finally give way to Latin only. The Latin inscriptions, although usually brief, are none the less impressively rich in allusions to the Roman past and to words and meanings employed in similar contexts across the whole wide Christian world from Gaul and Trier to North Africa. The authors of the outstanding studies presented here have important things to tell us about the history of scripts, emphasising local continuity from Roman times, and offering fascinating insights into the technical relation of the carved texts and scripts to model books and wax tablets, even noticing where a sculptor has followed the strokes of a painted inscription. Most striking is the relationship revealed of some inscriptions to the great Gospel books of the eighth century, notably the Lichfield Gospels: Llandeilo Fawr 2A provides a unique stone replica of the square frame of the cross on p. 220 of that manuscript.

Apart from the secure example of St Davids 8, the elaborate grave marker of the two biblically named sons of Abraham, bishop of St David's (1078 terminus post quem), and just possibly the Saturnbiu of St Davids 10A, from a probable hermitage on Ramsey Island, the authors are wisely cautious about identifying any of the memorials as those of known historical personalities, as tended to be done in the past, or about linking monuments together because of apparent duplication of names. This wise caution stems from the very impressive clarity and exactness of the linguistic and epigraphic knowledge displayed here. This new survey of Welsh sculptured and inscribed monuments, while taking full and generous account of earlier scholars, Nash-Williams obviously, and also for example in their different fields Romilly Allen and Jackson, sets out to provide a reasoned refinement of older groupings of the monuments. It is ironical, therefore, that among the useful comparative data drawn from other parts of the Insular world, the cross-slab in, not ‘from’, Elgin cathedral, Moray, cited for its important portraits of the Evangelists, is categorised in definitely outmoded terms as a ‘Pictish Class ii symbol stone’. However, one would not want to end this review on a note of complaint from north Britain. Nancy Edwards must be warmly congratulated for producing a volume which in its intellectual precision, apparatus and presentation, is quite outstanding.