At the heart of this splendid monograph lies a simple truth previously more or less unnoticed. Where the activities of monastic chroniclers have been treated as literary achievements attributable to the skills and energy of lone ‘historians’, we would do much better to look to the role played by heads of houses in encouraging, in themselves undertaking, or on occasion in deliberately suppressing such work. The Benedictine Rule placed parchment, wax tablets and pens under direct abbatial command. Monastic book-buying was only possible with abbatial approval. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that heads of house were crucial to the success of any local literary enterprise. Today, even a historian's modest personal library is likely to contain more books than could be accessed in all save a handful of the greater medieval monastic collections. Hence the particular significance of abbots and priors, both as purchasers and as ‘inter-library’ lenders of books. Hence the extent to which acknowledgement of abbatial approval – by Orderic Vitalis, for example, of abbot Roger of Saint-Evroul – is no mere platitude, but an important pointer to the circumstances in which all monastic historians worked. Abbots themselves might write what they liked, as with Hugh of Flavigny, Suger, Peter of Cava, Robert of Torigny or Henry of Blois, refashioning their own institutional histories for the purposes of polemic or self-advertisement. But without abbatial sponsorship, no mere monk or nun could hope that his or her work would be properly copied or ‘published’. A Matthew Paris or a William of Malmesbury would be inconceivable without such support. Here Pohl draws our attention to the many chroniclers who were either silenced by their superiors (at least briefly, both Paul the Deacon and Rabanus Maurus), or obliged to subvert authority. Thus Eadmer tells us that he destroyed his history at Archbishop Anselm's command, but only after making a secret copy, thereafter published at a time (as Pohl points out) when Canterbury itself was placed beyond archiepiscopal censorship. Guibert of Nogent wrote his commentary on Genesis in defiance of abbatial command, at night and under the bedclothes. Andreas of Marchiennes, although supported in his ventures by abbot Simon, deliberately ignored the terms of his abbot's commission, writing quite another sort of history than the edifying refectory reading that the abbot had intended. Fully acknowledging earlier work on this theme by Norbert Kersken, Pohl has read voraciously in both the primary and secondary sources, not least in his own native German. His findings are occasionally conveyed in English idioms that his copy-editors (assuming that such still exist) might have done rather more to police: ‘William states to have spent’ (p.143), or ‘Having reformed the monastery of Hirsau along Cluniac customs’ (p.180), being typical instances of this tick. But compared to the richness of themes and variations here displayed, these are minor faults. Nor, given the vast range of materials here covered, should we quibble over the occasional factual slip (for instance, that Waverley was a daughter of Rievaulx, p.128, rather than its predecessor by several years). As for the materials themselves, every reader will have their own suggested additions. My own might begin with the Becket materials, so expertly manipulated and broadcast from Canterbury by priors Alan of Tewkesbury and Benedict of Peterborough, and would certainly extend to Geoffrey of Vigeois and Bernard Itier, writing in the first case as an independent prior trained at Saint-Martial Limoges, in the second as Saint-Martial's librarian, apparently obliged, as we may now suppose through lack of abbatial approval, to scribble his chronicle as a series of marginal notations to other people's books. Pohl is an enthusiast not merely for his authors but for the physical memorials they have bequeathed, drawing on a magnificent conspectus of original manuscripts preserved in libraries and archives on two continents, from Arras to Zwetl, and from Austin, Texas, to the Morgan Library in New York. His passion here is tangible and no doubt explains his otherwise doubtful conjecture that what drew the Vikings to Saint-Wandrille was the prospect of looting its books: beyond a few jewelled bindings, I suspect that was about the last thing that such marauders were seeking. Due emphasis is allowed to female as well as male agency, Pohl noticing with typical insight that the nuns of Barking almost rivalled Gandersheim in the chronological span of the narratives commissioned by their abbesses. At a time when academics find their research increasingly ‘ring fenced’ or censored, writing to command and for the purposes of ‘impact’, rather than as previously ‘ad libitum’, there are correspondences in plenty to be savoured here. God forbid that the modern university system be dismissed as a ‘stabula porcorum’ (p.120) or, as was the case with various of their medieval predecessors, that any latter-day university manager consider themselves a ‘keeper of pigs’ (p. 260). For every Benedict Biscop, however, as Pohl reminds us, seeking out the very best books for devotion or scholarship, there were plenty of abbots whose principal concern was for their ‘compensation package’, and who either pillaged their own libraries (the equivalent, perhaps, of the present craze for ‘de-acquisition’) or had little idea even of where the books were kept. As with the best of today's Oxbridge Heads of House, thank goodness for the learned, employing their abbatial lodgings both as libraries and as private study spaces. Whether or not we allow Alcuin's copy of Pliny the elder to be a work of history (p. 299), at least those monks fortunate enough to have access to Pliny's Historia naturalis had something better to read than the average run of internal memoranda and vice-cancellarial trumpet-blowing with which today's academic historians are so regularly bombarded. This is a clever, lively and highly imaginative book. After reading it, our view of the monastic chronicler can never again be quite the same.